EDT619 Blog

Many educators I know, including myself, would agree with the Deweyan idea that the goal of education is to help students lead lives rich in worthwhile experiences. We strive to broaden horizons and grow perspective. The difference for our students is how we go about reaching those goals. For Dewey, it was the difference between ordinary experience and “an” experience. The ordinary experience is one that occurs simply because we as humans interact with our environment and therefore, naturally have experiences. These events happen through the mere course of living, and are not further developed beyond this surface level. In contrast to ordinary experience, Dewey proposed the idea of “an” experience. It is here where material “runs its course through to the end”. In such experiences, a problem is solved, a game is played to the end, a situation is rounded out and it's elements connected in unity to one another. It is an event of thinking and meaning driven by anticipation of the en...

SAMR is a framework for technology integration that was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura. SAMR is an acronym for “Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition”. The SAMR framework represents the spectrum of technology usage in the classroom. At one end, there is substitution, where technology is used as a replacement. This includes using electronic copies of texts or documents, as well as students using virtual presentation tools such as Powerpoint. In a similar fashion, the next rung on the ladder of SAMR is augmentation, which is the replacement of traditional tools with technological ones but with a significant increase in student productivity or capability. Both substitution and augmentation are considered “enhancements” which take traditional teaching up a notch or two. What comes next in SAMR is the transformation stage, or the top two rungs of the ladder. These steps, modification and redefinition, are when technology provides the students with experiences that pr...