At school, the tech committee is discussing a vision and mission for technology. I opened an email- from one of the many folks I get email from. Usually I delete them. Too little time. But this time, I didn’t. Among the news, there were links to a couple of very interesting blogs. Since one of the conversations on the tech group was the ever-present complaint about “how do we get teachers to use technology more?” “how do we get them to participate in training?” “how do we get them to see that students using tech in pursuit of education is not just for the computer department or the ‘tech people’ ?” The blogs I found seem to relate to these issues.
Anyway, part of the answer may be to start using the technology itself to address the issues. Since it is hard to get teachers to come to after school training, why not do more to provide training that they can do from their own computer, at their own time and pace? I just created a very simple lesson on podcasts that teachers will be able to access from their email client. While the school’s tech coordinator worked with me on this project, she and the curriculum coordinator have come up with an idea.
Elaine (curriculum) will be working to post information about technology that teachers can use easily. Much of her stuff could be websites that are simple to find, navigate, and use. She calls her part the “tech for dummies” domain. An example would be a website for making rubrics. In her posting, she would give a blurb about the website and how teachers can use it.
Betty (ed-tech) will do similar postings, but on topics that might be a little more complex. Betty’s topics might require a bit of a tutorial that she will either point to (if there is already one created and posted online) or that she will create. Still, these postings will focus on things that teachers could do fairly easily, and that do not require a great deal of help or direct training.
I have been thinking about how you get teachers who are not much in touch with tech to understand the importance of doing more. Honestly, in the last few months, I have heard teachers at both middle school and upper school level explain that they do not have enough time in their curriculum to show students how to use a spreadsheet, but explaining that it was important, that students should be able to do it, and that they would give assignments using spreadsheets if only the students knew how. They were math teachers, and–impatient soul that I am–I just wanted to slap them into reality. or yell. or something. Honestly, sometimes I am dumbfounded. Who’s job do they think it is? Why do they think a computer teacher–or anyone else– is more qualified to teach students to use spreadsheets for analysis of numeric information than they are? It gets frustrating. Sometimes feel like a canary in a mine. But anyway, what I was going to say is that I think we should also post information for teachers that relates to the use of technology, the power of technology, the importance of technology for learning. Even, the importance of students learning to use digital tools in preparation for college and their work lives.
I think that some of these blogs would be good to share. Perhaps if teachers read more about what others are doing, what others think about the application of this media to the classroom, then they will start thinking how they can use it. As a good private school, we don’t really have teachers who don’t care about teaching–who don’t take pride in being good, even excellent, at what they do. But we do have people who don’t “get it” when it comes to integrating technology. We even have people who are at least somewhat anti-tech. In their view, computers take away the human interaction that they think is a critical component of good teaching. In their view, it takes us away from the good, sound values of traditional education. It is alienating. It often doesn’t work, or fails you when you count on it. They haven’t developed the fluency or flexibility to adapt or problem-solve the technical difficulties that come with using technology. And they are mistrustful and supicious of it.
I think that we will gain from feeding them information, conversations, essays that deal with intelligent people, respected academicians, good teachers discussing how digital tools can enhance teaching and learning. That’s why I was excited about the blogs I found today.
Here they are:
Britannica’s Brave New Classroom 2.0
I was especially interested in something I found on tween teacher. At least at this moment, we seem to have many teachers who–when trying to integrate tech into the classroom– get confused about what counts. Some think it is showing a video. Some think it is showing a PowerPoint. We are working toward the idea that it means students using the tech tools, not just the teacher in the front of the room. This picture struck me as relevant.
And it was accompanied by this very relevant text:
Yet, this model got me reflecting about technology’s role in classroom collaboration: by blocking many of the online sites for collaboration from our schools, we as educators have censored the very tools of collaboration that this generation of students speaks. By blocking blogging sites, wiki sites, YouTube, etc…we are also blocking our students from the tools of their future.
