The Technology Integration Matrix is an interesting way to look at how involved I am in technology for my classrooms. While I fall solidly in the middle of the chart, the particular "box" I inhabit depends on the class and the setting I have at my disposal. My teaching has reached the "infusion" stage in some classes, but that was before I started teaching high school.

For my classes right now, the technology used depends on the class. While my French classes fall mostly into  some level of the "adaptation" column, the English classes that I teach are mostly in the "adoption" column. My students use technology actively and/or collaboratively in most cases.

My French classes, for example, have used technology for in-class projects dealing with vocabulary and culture. I have been told that many of my students do not have internet access at home, so I do not assign internet-based activities outside of the classroom. In the classroom, however, students have used technology to research countries for presentations. They have been directed to specific websites and given parameters for presentation software based on what would work on our classroom computers. This puts the 8th grade French class in the authentic/constructive - adoption/adaptation area. They were allowed to go beyond the given website to find more information once they had explored the selected sites, so they moved between adoption and adaptation in that sense. They were dealing with a world context, and the project was constructive in building meaning and understanding of the materials. They did move into collaboration, but only marginally aided by the technology available. The presentations were done as group projects, which one student in the group saved to their h-drive. I have access to each student's h-drive in order to be able to present it on a screen through my computer, but they do not have access to each other's h-drives. If they needed to collaborate outside of class, it had to be done by email. Some students did choose to do this, but most of the work was done in class. We need to have more collaborative tools available to our students for my classes to move to collaborative adoption/adaptation and beyond, which we are currently exploring.

In the future, I would like to be able to move my classes toward the collaborative infusion levels, as I have done in the past with my college teaching. For example, I would like to have an ongoing Wiki for assigned groups, with assignments geared toward language building and cultural competence. This is only one goal for the future, but I intend to keep adding technology to my classes in ways that will enhance student learning as I continue to learn new ways to apply technological tools.