You’ll have to forgive my windswept look, but I took this picture after spending two thrilling days at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, working with participants in this year’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute.

My role at the institute is to teach and coach the participants in creating projects integrating technology. Here is the list of tools we talked about:

• Google Drive
• Scrible
• VideoNot.es
• Popcorn Maker
• Animoto
• Explain Everything/Educreations
• Wordle/Tagxedo
• Shakespeare Searched
• ToonDoo
• QR codes
• GarageBand (Audacity was discussed during the Technology Fair in another session)
• iMovie (I mentioned Windows Movie Maker as a Windows alternative as well as YouTube’s video editor)
• Screencast-O-Matic

Some of the other instructors discussed other tools, and I also taught other tools during a “technology fair” in which TSI participants circled around for quick instruction and discussion about various tools.

If you are an English teacher, you really must try to find a way to go to a TSI. If you can’t give up four weeks of your summer (I know how that is because I couldn’t do it either and went instead to a mini-TSI), then you must seek out opportunities to see the Folger educators at conferences, such as NCTE, or try to bring them to your school. You will learn amazing things, and you will never teach Shakespeare the same way. You probably won’t teach other things the same way either. The Folger education folks are awesome at what they do.

I was thrilled to be asked to join them, and I had a wonderful personal tour of the library. I saw some unforgettable things. Of course, I was most excited to see a First Folio (I really wanted to touch it). Aside from that, perhaps my favorite item on exhibition right now is a vellum pedigree scroll commissioned by Edward IV for the purpose of legitimizing his kingship. It truly is incredible. Imagine that this scroll once belonged to Edward IV. THE Edward IV, as in the Yorkist king who overthrew the Lancastrian King Henry VI and was father to the two princes in the Tower and brother to the “evil” brother Richard III. That Edward IV. Can you imagine? Here are some details of the scroll: Detail 1 and Detail 2. Detail 1 shows Edward IV at the top, and begins his pedigree with God, moving down to Adam and Eve, and then Noah in Detail 2, and then forward to some (perhaps) more legitimate ancestry claims.

I also was able to see the drafts of the Shakespeare Coat of Arms from the College of Arms. It was really interesting to see such very old documents. Another real prize on exhibition is a family tree of Queen Elizabeth’s, starting with Henry III at the “root”—all the “branches” sprouting from Henry III’s stomach. You can see a detail of the pedigree here. Of course, through Henry VIII’s mother, Elizabeth of York, Queen Elizabeth descends from the York family (daughter of Edward IV), and from Henry VIII’s father, Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth descends from the Lancaster family. Both the Yorks and the Lancasters find their “root” in Edward III, who was the father of both John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund of Langley, Duke of York. It’s a fascinating document to look at, with so much detail.

Dan Bruno, who blogs for High School Matters (NCTE’s blog for the Secondary Section), has been capturing what being a part of the TSI is like for participants, and I would urge you to check out his blog, where you can learn much more about what is happening at the TSI.

The big takeaway about technology integration that Peggy O’Brien wanted participants to walk away with is that we don’t want to use technology for the sake of using technology. We want to use it to meet a need we have, which is exactly what the SAMR Model of technology integration asks teachers to examine. I took a stab at organizing the tools we discussed according to how I think they might fall on the SAMR Model, but of course, this organization scheme is subjective. Some people might use a tool as a mere substitution, while others might redefine an activity using that same tool.

My thinking on this grouping is that Scrible, which allows users to annotate websites and save those annotations in a library, essentially substitutes a technology tool for something you can already do. You can print articles/pages from websites and annotate them by hand. Scrible makes it unnecessary to print. ToonDoo is similar in that it allows you to create cartoons, but certainly we could always draw cartoons by hand. I see both of those tools as substitutions that don’t add real functionality. Of course, that is not to say that we shouldn’t use them. There is nothing wrong with substituting a technology tool for another kind of tool, but it is problematic if substitution is all we do when we say we are integrating technology.

I see Google Drive as having great potential. Depending on how it’s used, it can be redefining, but I placed it in Augmentation because we can certainly already use other tools to write, and we can either type or handwrite comments and feedback on that writing. What Google Drive does allow for is easier collaboration and editing of a document, so we do see a functional change. Google Drive has advantages over tools we have used to write with in the past. Animoto allows us to upload pictures and select a theme and music, and it organizes the pictures into a movie. We could certainly use other tools to do this same work, but Animoto does the editing for us quickly and easily, making it perhaps somewhat easier to use than, say, iMovie for editing a similar video. Shakespeare Searched similarly allows us to do something we could already do—search all the works of Shakespeare—but it adds a significant amount of functionality through the use of a search engine. We might take quite a long time to perform the same task without the tool.

I see the screencasting tools, word cloud tools, and VideoNot.es as offering something more than a functional change, however. Screencasting tools allow us to create videos of whatever we might be doing on a computer or iPad and share those videos with our students or the world. They offer opportunities to flip the classroom, or to demonstrate a technique or problem-solving process. Anything we can show someone how to do on a computer, we can also screencast. Theoretically, we could the same type of thing without the tool—but the tool allows for significant modification of the task. Word cloud tools, as much as we consider them to be somewhat simple technology tools, really do significantly modify a task. Can you imagine painstakingly filtering every word in a work of literature (if the work is long, the task is even more daunting), and taking a word count, then creating a word cloud indicating word frequency based on the size of the words in the cloud? Me either. I would never do this task with students if not for Wordle or Tagxedo, which means to me that these tools allow for significant modification of a task (perhaps even redefinition). VideoNot.es allows users to annotate videos. Sure, we can already take notes as we watch a video, but VideoNot.es integrates with our Google Drive account to save those notes to our drive, and it also allows us to navigate the video using our annotations.

I see Popcorn Maker, QR Codes, podcasting tools, and video editing tools as redefinition tools. Perhaps one could try to remix or put together various pictures and videos in iMovie, but Popcorn Maker doesn’t stop there: you can also add hyperlinks and social media to your remix, and you can also collaborate. I can’t think of a tool that allows users to do all of these things (or at least not as well as Popcorn Maker), so I see it as a tool that allows us to do tasks we couldn’t do without the tool. Podcasting can technically be done with a recording device, but GarageBand has a lot of elements that allow easy creation of podcasts and music. Frankly, I don’t know anyone who was using podcasting in their classroom before these tools came along. Actually, movie editing tools are similar. I think I made a movie with classmates for English class when I was in high school. We used a camcorder, which was cutting edge technology for the time. We certainly only did the one project, and it was quite unusual for students to create video projects at that time, and teachers just were not asking us to make them—most of us had no access to equipment that allowed us to make movies. Now, creating video projects is easy, and tools like iMovie make it simple to tell a digital story and edit it. I am seeing a lot more movie-making in classrooms today than I saw even five years ago. Going back ten years ago, it was rare, and fifteen years ago, when I was a fairly new teacher, no movie-making was happening in my school. Finally, I placed QR codes in the redefinition list because I was thinking of how I’ve seen them used. One project I was particularly proud of took place at my previous school. Students filmed each other working on art projects and talking about their artwork. Those videos were uploaded to YouTube and linked to QR codes. These codes were placed next to the works in exhibition around the building. This kind of interactive art exhibit wouldn’t have been possible to do without the QR codes—at least not with the kind of equipment we had. Worcester Academy had a QR code scavenger hunt for Digital Learning Day this year, and I don’t think the task could have been designed without the QR codes. Because they can link to anything, they’re useful in paper projects with digital elements. For example, one of my students created film as one of his genres for his multigenre project, but when he handed in the paper copy of the project, one page had a QR code linked to the film. It was quite handy.

In all, I think the discussion of exactly why you might want to use a tool, and what it can offer in terms of fuctionality and redesign of a task, is an important discussion to have. Substituting is fine, but if we really want to get the most out of our use of technology tools, we want to shoot more for modifying and redefining tasks using technology.