It is no secret that technology gives us all the information we could ever hope for at our fingertips. However, utilizing that technology in the classroom may not be that obvious to most teachers and students. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) is an organization the enthansizes the usage of technology to further education both inside the classroom and outside. ISTE consist of 7 standards. We will be discussing a few of these standards and how they may be helpful in aiding in a students learning.

ISTE standard 1, Empowered Learner, is about showing students what resources they have. Students may have a disconnect between their technology and their education , as it is not uncommon for teachers to forbid the usage of cell phones in their classes . Students may not know the capabilities their technology has or how to search for information to help them with their learning . By showing students powerful and education apps and website such as showing them how to graph multiple functions on demos or recomending Khan Academy, they will be introduced to websites that they know to access if they need additional assistance in their learning.

A great learning activity to ensure that students are understanding the material is to have them present their findings to their peers. For example, you can divide the students into groups and give them different difficult problems they have to work on and present. In which case, ISTE standard 6, Creative Communicator, will give the student the ability to better communicate what they have learned. Creating a visual aid, chart and google slides are all great ways to capture the student’s attention during a presentation. Not only will the student learn how to do the problem, they will also have to think about the best way to present the problem and solution in an easy to understand and effective manner. By having to think about the given problem in a different view point the students will get a deeper understanding of the information.

If you are teaching a subject that requires analyzing a large sum of data then by enforcing ISTE 5 and teaching students to become Computational Thinkers will allow students to be more efficient. Rather than having students go around and collect data for an assignment it would be more efficient if they learned how to go online to access large amounts of data for different topics. As long as students are shown how to differentiate websites that are credible and non biased and those that are not. . Not only can student easily access data online, they can also learn how to use tools such as excel. Though it is important for students to understand concepts such as means, mode and medians and how to compute them.

I hope that you found this brief introduction to a few of ISTE standards helpful. Please visit https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students if you want to learn more.

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