922D3Robinson,+Kristopher

=A Proposal for RITEA=

I propose that RITEA (Rhode Island Technology Educators Association) begin to create a online resources and textbooks through a wiki based system.

As teachers of technology education, it is all too clear to us that technology is constantly changing and at an increasing rate of speed. It makes it impossible for anyone to keep up to date, and for any textbook provider to keep accurate textbooks. Textbooks that were made just a few short years ago are already showing their age in the technology that they present. In my classroom alone I only have one set of textbooks. These textbooks were copyrighted in 1989. Obviously more than a few things that are printed in the books are no longer current technologies. With the budget crisis that the entire country is currently facing, there is little chance of getting funding to update textbooks.

As technology educators we have to stay current with all forms of technology. We do this in different ways including: reading articles on the internet and in magazines, attending the RITEA meetings were we are giving information on how to keep up with technology, taking classes at the college level, and participating in and attending conferences about technology. We are all continuously learning about technologies in our own specialty areas, to make this process easier for everyone we should develop a large knowledge base between the participants of RITEA to share our expertise.

If we could share the knowledge base of RITEA participants this would allow us to expand the technology curriculum, and enrich it. With the ability to create our own online textbooks that we can all use and amend with our knowledge this would allow us to collaborate with each other, as well as the possibility to have cross curricular continuity, and finally to share proven lesson plans from our own classrooms. There are already some [|colleges that are offering entire classes online.]What if we could offer parts of our classes online?

Most of us have already heard of [|Wikipedia]. This can be a fantastic tool for collecting & sharing information. Students already are very aware of this new technology, and now we as educators need to harness it. Now, we as educators, have to teach the students to become critical evaluators of the information. If educators can control the content of the wiki, we would be able to make a textbook that teachers could edit however, the students could only access and read.

The next logical step in this process is to put everyone’s collective curriculum to create a variety of open source textbooks for a variety of courses online that could be accessed by students not only at school, but also from home. A wiki would be a fantastic way of allowing all of us to come together with our knowledge and share it with each other, and our students. Here is an article that discusses using wiki’s to create online textbooks. [|Are Textbooks Becoming Extinct?] At the current time, I suggest we model our wiki off of the CK-12 chapters however, since there currently is no technology education section on this resource, I am thinking that we could use [|wikispaces] because it is free, relatively easy to use, and can have different information, pictures, and videos easily embedded into our own work. It would also allow RITEA participants to include chapter information, as well as lesson plans that others could use.

Road Blocks and ways to overcome them:
Teachers will need to be trained in using this new technology. This should not be too difficult since it is very similar to using a word processor. Sessions could be made available at the end of our monthly meetings to train and get fellow teachers involved in the project. Hopefully together RITEA can get all of the schools on board. Some of the schools might be apprehensive about allowing wiki’s on their internets because others might be able to add inappropriate information to the wiki. This is why I propose that we make the wiki able to edited only by invite. We could start by inviting only those teachers that come to our training sessions, and then as we grow more confident in our ability to use the technology, we could then invite other school department faculty to join in. We would also need to teach the teachers to use critical evaluation techniques of information found on the internet. However, this could also be done at RITEA meetings.

Examples:
Kim’s Webpage shows how students could interact with the web pages. However, for right now it would work better if we focused on teacher generated content. Kris’s Wiki Entry shows how we could make a basic chapter to work for our content area.
 * //[|CK-12]//** does a nice job of showing how eventually textbooks could be done totally online and be made available to the entire internet. Flexbooks is another example of an area to make actual text books that could be printed out.

With all of this information I am hoping that eventually we will be able to create online texts, and other resources that educators in the field of technology education can use to teach their classes. By creating an ever evolving textbook we will be able to keep up with technology from all around the world. When can then take that information and make unique lessons to use with the students and share with other technology educators.