Education

Collecting Dust

Collecting Dust Podcast

Collecting Dust This year completes my thirteenth year of teaching. In my thirteen years I have found that there are very few teachers that actually utilize technology in their classrooms. I have seen the fear that some teachers have when it comes to technology. When my school district changed from the hand written grade book to software that did most of the work for us, you would have thought the world was coming to an end. The countless number of teachers that moaned and groaned because they liked the old way better and never gave the program a chance to show them what it could do. Today, I see teachers with SMART Boards that never are used, document cameras sitting without being turned on, student computers collecting dust and it is very sad in my opinion.  As I walk from class to class, wracking my brain, and search the web for information on why this is, I find the reason to be that teachers are not trained correctly or enough and their resistance to learning something new.  There are a lot of administrators and teachers that are set in their ways and do not want to make room for new things in their offices/classrooms/lives.  Marc Prensky stated when a new technology appears, our first instinct is always to continue doing things within the technology the way we’ve always done it. That is almost exclusively what we now do with educational technology. We use it mostly to pass documents around, but now in electric form, and the result is not very different from what we have always known (Prensky, 2005).  People just don’t want to change but by learning something new, the challenges/duties we have in our day to day lives as teachers would be so much easier to take care of.  Jamie McKenziestated in 2001 that the evidence mounts that few American teachers feel adequately prepared for the challenge of using new technologies in any fashion, not to mention the challenge of using technologies to support curriculum rich, standards-based lessons (McKenzie, 2001).  Part of this is brought on by the teacher also and not by the training at hand.  I have found, when I do technology training at my school, that most teachers do not even pay attention to what is going on in the training.  They are surfing the web, talking to their neighbors, or just plain zoned out.  We often see this in our students and get upset with them for not paying attention, but then do it ourselves when it is our turn to learn.  Then when it is time for do the task that the training was over, they cannot recall how to go about it.  I believe that if there is provided training that walks teachers through the process of using the software, hardware, website, whatever it is, step-by-step and the teacher has to follow along, then they will understand it better and be more apt to using it in the future. It is the teacher’s responsibility to take control of the situation and move forward.  With that being said, I believe that if they are provided with a training that is hands on then that will provide the first opportunity to them to use and explore the technology that is in front of them.  It will give them time to get used to it and ask questions if they have it.  If they are unsure about something, most teachers will go back to their classrooms, put the information on a shelf, and never pull it out again because they feel intimidated by it.  If they are given the proper training, then more are likely to use it in the future.  Another issue stated by Sam Carlson, is teacher motivation to participate in professional development workshops in the use of technology. While so-called “champion teachers” will request and seek out professional development opportunities in the use of technology, the vast majority of teachers will not (Carlson, 2002).  I truly believe this.  Most teachers run in the opposite direction when it comes to technology.  If they were made aware of the tr

Collecting Dust

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Collecting Dust Podcast

Collecting Dust