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Extensive collection of quality resources for planning and developing lessons that infuse technology

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Educational technology for K-16 educators

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Extensive resources via a SAMR ThingLink

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4 different examples across the SAMR continuum

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8 examples of transforming lessons

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Examples of Applying the SAMR Model can Help Teachers Understand and Embrace it

The SAMR Model for integrating technology into teaching, developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, has gained a good deal of exposure in recent years. "SAMR" is an acronym that stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. The SAMR model provides a technique for moving through degrees of technology adoption to find more meaningful uses of technology in teaching and move away from simply using edtech for tech's sake.

We recently discussed the SAMR model during an Academic Technology Work Group meeting at The College of Westchester. We examined the video, SAMR in 120 Seconds. One thing that really struck me is how much the example helped, so I made it a point to gather and/or create some more examples.

Following are 8 examples of the SAMR process, each taking an example of a typical classroom exercise that does not use technology and walking it through each phase of SAMR. For half of these, I searched and borrowed from examples that teachers had written about online (original sources are provided - in some cases I tweaked the example a bit). I also created examples of my own. In working through this, it became apparent to me that while Substitution and Augmentation can be relatively straightforward conceptually, there is even more room for interpretation when it comes to Modification and Redefinition.

The goal of this exercise was to help me (and readers) better understand the SAMR model, and to really see how lessons and assessments can be transformed while considering the benefits of evolving them through these stages. I find it particularly interesting to see the vast difference between the original lesson and the redefined lesson - there is often a much wider range of skills required in the latter stages, and lessons can become much more engaging and collaborative when modified or redefined.

Lesson: Writing a Short Paper
Taken from: http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/08/samr-model-explained-through-examples.html. A modification of an idea found at https://edofict.wikispaces.com/SAMR+Examples. Taken from: https://edofict.wikispaces.com/SAMR+Examples and modified. Idea taken from: https://sites.google.com/a/msad60.org/technology-is-learning/samr-model and slightly modified. In this example, we take a simple form of assessment and evolve it into a collaborative group project.
Original Assignment: A hand written paper.

Lesson: Geography & Travel

Original Assignment: An overview of a location consisting of hand written content supplemented with compiled cut-and-pasted magazine clippings.

Lesson: Understanding Shakespeare

Original Assignment: Read a Shakespeare play in traditional printed format.

An Assessment Exercise
Original Assignment: Show understanding of fractions on a worksheet by coloring in blocks.
Original Assignment: Take a quiz, answers handwritten in a printed form.

Following are some example lessons, evolved through the SAMR model, that I have tried my hand at creating.It's easy to get caught up in worrying about how effectively an approach constitutes "modification" or "redefinition", but that's not the point of the exercise. To my way of thinking, it's more about understanding the difference between a just replacing or augmenting a "paper" lesson with a "digital" one and actually evolving it in a beneficial way and exploring new possibilities.

Lesson: Art/Painting
Creative Commons license image source.
Original Assignment: Drawing a picture using traditional brush, paint, paper. Of course, there is a a big difference between doing this by hand in the traditional manner and doing it digitally. Digitally is by no means better, it is just different and opens up some interesting possibilities.

Substitution: Use a digital drawing/painting program (like MS Paint) to draw/paint a picture.

Augmentation: Use a tool that allows the creation of your masterpiece to be layed back (like Educreations, for example).

Modification: Pull a background image to use as a canvas. You could even scan something hand drawn and use that.

Redefinition: Create Artwork Collaboratively using a Collaborative Online Whiteboard (like Twiddla or one of these other tools).

Lesson: Email Etiquette

Original lesson: Review printed copies of Email Etiquette concepts and guidelines.

Lesson: Learning Fractions

Substitution: Use an Excel Worksheet to let students color in the blocks.

Augmentation: Use Google Sheets to let students color in the blocks, where the teacher can offer feedback directly on Google Sheets.

Modification: Use Google Sheets and direct students to online examples and supplementary learning materials for areas that they might struggle with.

Redefinition: Use a Fractions App instead (here are a handful of examples for iOS devices).

Lesson: Phys Ed - Learning To Hit a Baseball Well

Original Assignment: Learning how to hit a baseball by watching and listening to a Coach or Phys Ed instructor show you and then trying it yourself.

Hopefully these example of lessons modified through the SAMR cycle help to encourage you to think about how you leverage technology to make some of your lessons more interactive, collaborative, and engaging with some of the many great technology tools available today! Here is a set of tools that may be helpful when working to evolve your lessons: 10 of the Most Engaging Uses of Instructional Technology (with Dozens of Resources and Tools).

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8 Examples of Transforming Lessons Through the SAMR Cycle - Emerging Education Technologies

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Examples of Applying the SAMR Model can Help Teachers Understand and Embrace it The SAMR Model for integrating technology into teaching, developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, has gained a good deal of exposure in recent years. "SAMR" is an acronym that stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.

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by Ruben Puentedura

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For teachers just starting out with educational technology, the task at hand can sometimes seem daunting. Even though tools such as the SAMR model can help, the plethora of choices available can prove paralyzing, frequently resulting in ongoing substitutive uses of the technology that block, rather than enable, more ambitious transformative goals.

The approach below is designed to help overcome this barrier, and is inspired in its form by Alexander's notion of Design Patterns -- a clearly structured solution to a recurring design problem -- which has been applied to education scenarios by Bergin et al. While it is not laid out exactly as a design pattern would be, it nonetheless provides a framework that a teacher could use in similar fashion.

The goal for the teacher is to construct a simple SAMR ladder that is coupled to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy -- i.e., as the task moves from lower to upper levels of the taxonomy, it also moves from lower to upper levels of SAMR. The two Enhancement levels of SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation) are associated with the three lower levels of Bloom (Remember, Understand, Apply), while the two Transformation levels of SAMR (Modification, Redefinition) are associated with the upper levels of Bloom (Analyze, Evaluate, Create). In turn, within each grouping a similar ordering occurs -- e.g., Remember-type tasks are primarily associated with S-level uses of the technology, Understand-type tasks are associated with either S- or A-level uses of the technology, and so on. The following diagram illustrates this association.

This coupling of the SAMR model and Bloom's Taxonomy has several desirable outcomes:

The already-familiar drive to reach the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy now also acts as a drive to reach the upper levels of SAMR;

The approach outlines a clear set of steps that help guide the introduction of technology in the classroom;

Finally, the approach helps avoid pitfalls of self deception -- i.e., assuming that a particular task is at a higher level in either the Bloom or SAMR sense than it actually is.

It is important to realize that this association between SAMR and Bloom's Taxonomy is not a necessary -- or even habitual -- coupling. Thus, it is possible to use extremely powerful redefinition-level approaches to make certain types of memorization tasks possible; conversely, it is also possible to undertake novel create-type tasks that only make basic substitution/augmentation use of the technology. Additionally, far more complex couplings between SAMR and Bloom are possible, involving convergent/divergent branchings, oscillations between levels, skipping of some SAMR levels, etc. Nonetheless, the simple structure described above is well suited to beginning practitioners' needs, and even retains usefulness for more experienced faculty.

In addition to the integration of SAMR and Bloom described above, two more ingredients are necessary for the best results:

a clear motivation for the change -- the best results are obtained when a teacher has a strong reason for changing existing practice that is independent of the introduction of technology.

a clean app flow, designed to move through the tasks, that is as simple as possible, avoiding needless complexity -- e.g., in transferring work products from one app to the next.

Finally, let's look at an example of this approach in practice. In this example, we will set up a general pattern for math activities, where the motivating factor is to take math instruction from a mode where -- to use Richard Skemp's words -- instrumental understanding dominates (how) to a mode where relational understanding is primary (how and why). This shift in math instruction can be seen in changes in curricula worldwide, and is crucial to students' capacity to use -- and enjoy -- the math they have learned in the world outside the classroom. In the interest of making the example more tangible, the context will be a course in introductory statistics, although the general pattern is readily applicable to other math courses.

1. Substitution/Remember: Students use ebooks and other Open Education Resources to acquire basic knowledge about statistical tools and procedures.

2. Substitution/Understand: At the same time, they begin a process of gathering information online describing applications of these statistical tools to an area of interest to them, using simple bookmark aggregation services (e.g., Diigo, Delicious) to collect and tag these resources, relating them to the knowledge gained in 1.

3. Augmentation/Apply: Using a simple yet powerful tool for visualization like GeoGebra, students explore the concepts covered in the resources described in 1., and solve related standard problems. The scope and number of the problems is not governed by what is available in the "back of the book," but rather driven by the evolution of student understanding, as measured by suitable formative assessment processes.

4. Modification/Analyze: The students also apply similar problem-solving approaches to questions raised in the materials they found in 2. In doing so, they will reconstruct the reasoning of the original authors, and verify -- or disprove -- their conclusions.

5. Modification/Evaluate: Students now select a subset of the materials studied in 4. for further critique and/or development, using GeoGebra as their primary analysis tool. Via a blog, they explain this work to fellow students, and invite their feedback to refine both the clarity of their explanations and the focus of their work.

6. Redefinition/Create: Students refine their blog post into a short digital video project, with the goal that it will be used as part of instructional materials in subsequent years.

Photo " sky puzzle" by Jared Tarbell. Used under a CC BY 2.0 license.

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SAMR and Bloom's Taxonomy: Assembling the Puzzle

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For teachers just starting out with educational technology, the task at hand can sometimes seem daunting. Even though tools such as the SAMR model can help, the plethora of choices available can prove paralyzing, frequently resulting in ongoing substitutive uses of the technology that block, rather than enable, more ambitious transformative goals.

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ThingLink image providing examples of class tasks across the SAMR continuum