Technology is a crucial part of our interdisciplinary unit plan, specifically in the respect that "within every discipline today, knowledge is either furthered or created with the use of digital technologies" (Galileo Educational Network, 2016, para. 2) and thus plays a significant role in integrating the disciplines together. Throughout the unit, democratic decision making is a strong concept for students to take away at the end. Hence, to emphasize this, students well be required after certain activities to comment briefly on how their learning group succeed in reaching consensus. This will be achieved by posting on a communal Trello board, where each learning group will have a feed on the board and each member can post messages to that board. The board will be public so that other learning groups can see the strategies of each others groups and perhaps utilize those strategies themselves to improve the democratic decision making in their group. At the end of the unit, students have to compose an individual reflection regarding how they participated democratically within their group. Thus, the Trello boards will serve as a digital catalogue that students can pull examples from for their final individual reflection.
Figure 1. Example Trello board for digital record keeping. This figure demonstrates how students would utilize technology to record their democratic decision making processes.
The main summative Settlement Proposal Design is completely technology based. Students are required to create a digital presentation, whether it be a commercial or a music video, that showcases their portfolios from the preceding activities and presents a persuasive argument as to why their earthly compatriots should choose their settlement at which to come live. In this way, technology is an integral aspect of the final assessment, and is utilized in a purposeful and authentic way. Technology is also incorporated in a more incidental way throughout all of the lessons, using videos and online programs to help engage students with their learning. In this way, like the Galileo Educational Network (2016) suggests, technology is utilized as a media in several different ways: for inquiry, with the internet serving as a tool for research; for communication, using Trello boards as a tool for data organization; and for expression, using interactive video for the final assessment project. Thus, digital technologies serve to "extend, expand, and deepen student learning" (Brown, 2016, p. 20) within this interdisciplinary unit plan.