My take on OETS

After reading through the Oregon Education Technology Standards (OETS), I believe that I can speak to the main idea behind such standards. Our society is moving toward a mobile, technologically savvy population and workplace, so in order to even function in such a society, students must learn how to utilize technology in a variety of situations, and not only use it to learn and critically think, but also learn how to become good digital citizens as well. Since parents are not as up on the latest technology as their children, it's up to educators to make sure that our future generations can use technology in a useful and appropriate manner.

As a language arts teacher, research and information fluency (Standard #3), is a huge deal. All students will be required to write essays and find sources, and anymore, the easiest way to find sources is to search online. Developing these online researching skills will stand every student in good stead, whether or not they go on to higher education, because finding information online, such as finding the cheapest insurance, to quickly finding out a politician's platform, has become a life skill in our society. Also, as educators, we have to make sure that our students can use the appropriate tools for the task, so we must help them be able to analyze the sources they find and evaluate them for their biases and trustworthiness. All of these skills that revolve around research and information fluency are some of the most important skills that some students can learn from secondary education.

Evaluating online sources also relates to critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making (Standard #4), as we teach students about various ways to find information, they must figure out which source is best for the kind of information they need, and which source is the most free of biases and wrong information, and then make decisions based on their findings. I believe a good activity for my students would be to have them each take a Wikipedia article in which they are interested, and examine it for biases, and examine the sources that each article uses, and then see if they can improve it. Not only will it engage them in critical thinking and evaluating, it will interest them in writing and in thinking about how their writing appears when it is available to a wide audience, such as those who will find it on the internet. There are many more practical applications of technology I can see using in a language arts classroom, such as blogging to promote good digital citizenship and outside classroom discussion, but critical thinking and researching are two of the biggest categories necessary for language arts classes.