For this blog post I decided to look at 2nd Grade Math Standards according to the Georgia Performance Standards.

I looked at the 12 content standards (and did not examine the elements within each standard. I also did not examine the process standards) and found the following results:

Number of standards that focused on critical thinking skills: 2
Number of standards that did not focus on critical thinking skills: 10

To the credit of the DOE, I will say that if I more closely examined each element under each standard, and more closely examined the process skills in addition to the content area standards, I would find a greater attention to critical thinking skills.

Under the content area standards, however, I think the verbs within each standard told a lot. Many of the standards included language such as "understand", "use", and "know" as opposed to higher-order thinking skills such as "compare", "classify", "contrast", and so on.

An area of improvement I see would be with the following standard:

M2M2. Students will tell time to the nearest five minutes and know relationships of
time such as the number of minutes in an hour and hours in a day.

In terms of improving students' critical thinking skills, I would suggest the following:

Include activities such as:
Compare and contrast the similarities and differences between one second, one minute, one hour, and one day
Describe activities that take one second, one minute, one hour, and one day to complete

In terms of improving technology integration into this lesson, I would suggest the following ideas:
Have students perform activities that take one second, one minute, one hour, and one day, and record them (or a snippet of them if it's too long) and create a movie to share with the class

To the DOE's credit, as a 2nd grade teacher in Georgia, I loved (and my students got a great deal out of) the sample Frameworks that the DOE posts online. They definitely incorporated critical thinking skills, and sometimes included technology as well. This was a great resource that I would use in both my instructional planning and instructional delivery (https://www.georgiastandards.org/Frameworks/Pages/BrowseFrameworks/MathK-5.aspx).