Why is It Important?

ISTE 2016 Student Standards

Empowered Learner

Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.

Students:

articulate and set personal learning goals, develop strategies leveraging technology to achieve them and reflect on the learning process itself to improve learning outcomes.
build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process.
use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.
understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.

Knowledge Constructor

Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.

Students:

plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.
evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility and relevance of information, media, data or other resources.
curate information from digital resources using a variety of tools and methods to create collections of artifacts that demonstrate meaningful connections or conclusions.
build knowledge by actively exploring real-world issues and problems, developing ideas and theories and pursuing answers and solutions.

Innovative Designer

Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.

Students:

know and use a deliberate design process for generating ideas, testing theories, creating innovative artifacts or solving authentic problems.
select and use digital tools to plan and manage a design process that considers design constraints and calculated risks.
develop, test and refine prototypes as part of a cyclical design process.
exhibit a tolerance for ambiguity, perseverance and the capacity to work with open-ended problems.

Student Agency and Constructivism

Constructivist learning theory “rests upon the assumption that knowledge is constructed by learners as they attempt to make sense of their experiences” (Driscol, 2005, p. 287). According to Clemmons (2006), when learning with constructivism “the student is instead urged to construct questions and seek out possible answers” (p. 20). Constructivism promotes learning by encouraging students to use critical thinking and problem solving skills in order to gain the required knowledge; constructivism simply means that the students must take ownership in their learning (Blaik-Hourani, 2011). One way for students to take ownership of their learning is to have them assemble artifacts of in a portfolio (Buzzetto-More, 2010). ~Adam Williams

The Importance of Reflection

Reflection Is the Most Important Part of the Learning Process

Highlights

[The] results reveal reflection to be a powerful mechanism behind learning, confirming the words of American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey: “We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.” … In fact, these beneficial effects seem to be lasting.

In the end, both of the groups that were tasked with thinking about the pre-test performed significantly better than the group that did not spend any time thinking about the tasks at hand.

Why Sites as Platform?

Sites offers the opportunity to have all three in one, or mix and match as wanted/needed.

Students can have as many sites as they need/want.

Students can share their work with the world, just their district, those with the link, or just those they add as collaborators.

Sites has option to stop search engines from searching for the site. This would, in essence, only give access to those with the link.

Report abuse