The article, "Backwards Planning Takes Time", by Rebecca Alber from Edutopia, served to reinforce several ideas that I'm sure we're all familiar with, the main one for be being that your summative assessments have to be guided and informed by the standards and/or learning objectives you want to assess. This is not groundbreaking educational insight, but this short piece did get me thinking about the ways in which many teachers use technology in their practice.

I see some of my colleagues jumping on this, that, or the other technology bandwagon, all fired up and ready to start using some cool technology in their classrooms. The thing is, they're not linking it to any standards or objectives; they just see something that looks cool or interesting and throw that at their students because they feel like or hope) it will make the topic more fun or engaging. My experience is that kids can sniff out this kind of pointless assignment a mile away, technology based or not. And while it may be fun or interesting for the students to use a new form of technology, they will quickly see that the assignment has no real point and lose interest. One thing that I have learned thus far in this master's program is that if teachers plan to really use technology in meaningful and engaging ways, they must plan for it just as they would any other lesson, project, activity, or assessment. This is done not by throwing in a cool technology project just for the fun of it, but by carefully assessing what kinds of technology-based instruction will best help the students meet the learning goals and objectives. In some cases, technology use my not always be the best solution, so we have to careful about using all of the tools that modern educators have available.

And remember, even though it would be nice to be seen as the "fun, cool" teacher who lets their students engage in a lot of technology use, the kids will become disenchanted if they're not really learning anything from it.