Building confidence, collaboration and community
The Mayonnaise SAMR
Reading Guy Claxton’s blog ‘Making Mayonnaise’ today struck a chord with me on two different levels.
Firstly, I actually do make mayonnaise (below) and had just made our first summer batch this morning. I managed to source some black garlic at the markets and made a top class aioli.
Secondly Guy's mayo-making analogy to give "slow and timely professional learning" in developing skills in technology gave me food-for-thought to support teachers to "whisk [new technologies] into their daily teaching practice"
This is so important for teachers to remember to go slow and develop deep skills when integrating technology into their teaching practice.
​
The SAMR Model, developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura provides a technique for moving through degrees of technology integration to find more meaningful uses of technology in teaching and move away from simply using “tech for tech’s sake”.
“SAMR” is an acronym that stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.
​
The SAMR model is more like a spectrum of technology integration and it is important for teachers to understand that not every lesson needs to be registering in the 'Redefinition' phase but every lesson using technology needs to be used in a meaningful way.
At one end of the SMAR model (Substitution), technology is used as a one-to-one replacement for traditional tools and then at the other end of the spectrum (Redefinition), technology enables experiences that were previously impossible without it.
​
Remember!
Both teachers and students need to develop one skill at a time.
SAMR Mayonnaise
Students replacing handwritten work by using a Google Doc will need to develop their word processing skills but why stop at Substitution?
Students can be encouraged to Augment their work by adding images, tables and embedding hyperlinks to other material into their Google Doc.
Student writing undergoes a transformation at this Modification point where their ideas could be published for a wider audience either in their own blog or in blogs managed by their teacher.
To Redefine the learning process the teacher needs to think of learning activities that were previously inconceivable without the use of technological skills such as creating meaningful text, collaborating with others and exercising digital citizenship. A prime example would be to create a Twitter account (managed by the teacher) to share the learning journey with other students.