Guest Post: SAMR and me

SAMR was such a new concept to me I decided to ignore it. I’ve been out of the classroom for a while. I didn’t understand it and it seemed too removed from what I was doing in the classroom. But I found myself wanting to get the students to use their devices to their full potential. I had a desire to transform the teaching and learning in my classroom. I wanted the SAMR model in my classroom without knowing it.

Here is the first electronic worksheet I made for my class.

I learned how to

• get images from Youtube
• share a google doc using Teacher Dashboard
• get the students logged on to the internet (this was still a new thing they were learning)
• teach the students how to save their work from notability back onto their drive
• then mark their work online (this was a disaster as I wrote in the comments box on my laptop that does not show up on a iPad).

But when I reflected on the lesson the worksheet could have been done on paper. According to the SAMR model I hadn’t moved very far from traditional pen and paper (Substitution).

I was very disappointed and annoyed at Steve (my IT go to guy). He had encouraged me to go through all that extra work and I hadn’t used the device any better than doing a pen and paper activity. Steve reminded me that sometimes learning takes place in the process rather than the end product. The students and I had done a lot of learning along the way.