SAMR Remix Update & Redefining the Role of the Learner.

It's been almost two years since I've updated my resources for SAMR and Bloom's Taxonomy. 

As I was considering the newest tools out for students to use, it became really clear that as time has gone by my own view of what is "Redefinition" has shifted. This really highlights the subjective nature of the SAMR model. What is Redefining in one classroom, may not be that at all in another. 

When I first began to develop SAMR resources back in June 2014, I placed Nearpod under the Redefinition category. Back then the possibility of putting your presentation directly into every student's hands where they could see clearly and engage in the lesson seemed so forward thinking. When I revised in 2016, I chose to keep it there because of the addition of so many interactive elements, the ability to self-pace for differentiation and of course the virtual field trips that allowed kids to go to even the coral reef. Now, as I look at how far technology integration in the classroom has progressed, I realized that it's time to recategorize it. In this version, I chose to place Nearpod in the Augmentation category, mostly because even with self-pacing, Nearpod is primarily a teacher driven tool that allows students to share their thinking in different ways with their teacher or explore something someone else created. 

Today as I consider tools and integration, I ask myself these things: 

• Are students creating? 
• Are students able to push back the walls of the classroom and reach a larger, more global audience?
• Are students given choice in what they use and how they share?

The more control over the learning and sharing of learning that can be achieved by the student, the better. With those questions, I see myself moving away from SAMR strictly in the sense that I'm referring to technology integration and more toward looking at ways to REDEFINE the role of the LEARNER, which in my own opinion is the real role of technology. 

This is not a be all end all guide to integration of technology, rather a work in progress. The tools represented here, if used in different ways with different intentions by the student, can allow them to redefine their own role. For example, when a teacher uses a Google Form to collect data from students, it's simply Substitution, but when a student makes the decision to create a Google Form to collect data for personal record and goal setting or, even better, for a specific project that seeks to gather information from people from around the world, and they then take that data and visualize it with reports, it changes the role of the tool. Students are redesigning tasks to meet their own needs, collecting data from far and wide in ways they wouldn't have easily been able to do before. In this case we see the tool can be used in an Augmentation or Modification capacity.

In 2018, our students can easily share their thinking, their findings, their judgements with a global audience through video, book publishing and podcasting, and they can model and prototype in 3D with virtual and augmented reality, and there are plenty of tools out there to make these tasks even better.

The interactive image below includes links to resources and ideas for use. Be sure to check out the resources with the red target for background. Blue targets will send you to the resource, and black will send you to different ideas for implementation.