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ISTE Classroom Observation Tool
by Jim McDermott

ISTE has developed a wonderful tool to help schools assess their technology integration efforts.  The Classroom Observation Tool provides a checklist to guide you in observing how education technology is affecting classroom instruction.  The tool is built on top of Adobe Air and allows you to work offline and then upload your results so you can access them from anywhere and share them with your instructional teams. 

The tool has six main sections:  Setting, Groups, Activities, Technology, NETS, and Chart. 

• The setting section collects information like teacher, grade, subject, number of students, time, room description, and student characteristics.
• The groups section asks about student groupings, percentage of students engaged, if technology is being used for academic content learning effectively, the role of the teacher, and comments on this.
• The activities section helps you identify what types of activities are taking place and how essential the technology was to the lesson or not.
• The technology section asks which technologies are being used by the teacher and which technologies are being used by the student.
• As you might expect, the NETS section has the National Education Technology Standards listed for you to check which ones you see being employed.
• And the chart section lists the class time in 3 minute segments and asks you to select if technology is in use by students / for learning and if technology is in use by the teacher / for learning.   It them sums it up by the total number of minutes technology is used for teaching and learning overall.

This is a powerful tool to guide technology vision planning, guide curriculum development, and encourage the effective use of technology on the classroom level. 

I definitely recommend you check it out: http://icot.craftyspace.com/  (and click on downloads to get the tool onto your machine)