Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

According to the NETS-T1, as a teacher I should be using my knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance my student
learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments. I find this to be a very interesting challenge, because I have quite a bit of experience in all of those categories, but have not really combined them all together before.

As I have stated before, I really have not been utilizing the world of technology in my classroom very much in the last few years of teaching, but I am just now realizing the many ways in which I could use that technology to model ideas for my students and help them advance in their learning.

In order to "promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness" in my classroom through technology I could be using programs such as Finale, Sibelius, Audacity, or even Garage Band to have my students creating their own music. As we discover the "rules of music" or musical theory I could have the students write their own music by following the rules we have learned and inputting their creativity onto one of these software platforms.

Just this week I took an opportunity to have the students "engage in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources." I decided to have them do some real world research on the music of the Beach Boys, the decades that they were popular, and what was going on in the world at the time. I enabled the students to do this research in class by scheduling time for one of our school's laptop carts, then I had the students use the website nettrekker.com as their search engine. This is a new educational website that our school district has been granted access to, which allows students to search for topics using websites that have been filtered for their educational value.