Climbing the SAMR Ladder

Last month's Educational Leadership Magazine focuses on using mobile technology effectively with students.  Included are articles about the instructional use of tablets in class, classroom management with technology and intentional selection of teaching and learning apps.  A theme throughout was on student doing rather than teacher showing.

Inspired, I decided to attempt a crowd-sourcing activity with my Grade 7 students, to see if I could make their collective learning visible to the class.  We'd been learning about Heat in the Environment, and students were completing independent research assignments about a "big question" they had co-developed with peers and -- in some cases -- teacher guidance.

I used a padlet to collect students' discoveries to date; each group posted videos and general information about what they'd been learning, and as they did so, I tried to respond with specific questions to help them clarify, deepen or broaden their thinking.  In this way, all groups' summaries to date, as well as my related responses, were visible to everyone.

It was interesting to observe students' excitement as they saw one another's work in progress as well as their own posted publicly in the classroom. 

I noticed that a number of students began to access videos and weblinks that other groups had posted on our Padlet, and I marveled at how readily we were able to collectively share resources!

Since being introduced to it a few years ago at a workshop, I've been thinking a lot about the SAMR Model, and how teachers can best climb the ladder from "substitution" to "redefinition", assuming the latter is our ultimate goal.

In particular, I am interested in how digital immigrants begin to effectively incorporate technology into their instructional repertoire in transformational ways.  Or, to put it more simply, how old dogs like me learn new tricks!

Something that perplexes me is how we define the various tasks we old-timers attempt... it's all exciting and new to us, but is it transformational?  For example, my Science Padlet allowed for ways of sharing information effectively in a manner that would previously have been inconceivable... but did that really place it into the "redefinition" category, or was it merely a fancy, digital chart paper recording our class's thinking, and therefore, simply "substitution" on the SAMR ladder?

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I decided to have a look online to find out what others had to say. What I discovered is that the information online about SAMR has literally exploded in the past few years! 

Not only is there plenty of commentary about what SAMR is and how it can be used in the context of professional learning and self reflection, but there also exists now a number of handy visuals to provide us immigrants with an overview of where we might be in the general scheme of things.

For example, if I consider the overview provided below, I can see that I am moving forward along a jagged front.  For Note-taking and Presentation in my Math class this year, I am firmly in the Augmentation stage, whereas in in Assessment I have dabbled in Redefinition, and in file sharing I am ashamed to confess my residency in Substitution.

This jagged front, however, propels me forward: As I gain comfort with one area, I actively look for ways to improve in others.  Desperation and necessity drive my personal professional learning model, as evidenced in the number of OTF Connects technology workshops I signed up for this year, and the amount of time I spent on self-directed learning by reading articles, looking online, experimenting in class, and discussing solutions with colleagues.

reblogged from Pinterest

Although defining my early foray into the digital world often proved vague, it was without question a one-way street forward. My early experiments with things like Padlet,  Kahoot and Explain Everything in class were at best clunky... but increasingly, I am coming to see this awkward imperfection as a necessary first step for early adopters and hesitant converts alike.

Regardless of which rungs we find ourselves hanging from on the SAMR ladder, the ditto machine and overhead projector are gone, my friends, and they are not coming back.  There is only one direction in which to climb, and that direction is up!