Teachers and Technology

With technology savvy students and technology related teaching standards it is increasingly important that teachers too become tech savvy. The problem is that many are not, several are resistant to integration of technology. Districts implement new technologies in the form of email and grading systems with minimal training and some teachers never learn beyond the minimum (and some need reminders every term on how to post grades and things like that!). As buildings add more and more technology to classrooms teachers are having to adjust and evolve in their teaching styles - even if they want to continue to lecture and give notes teacher have to master new technologies to be able to. All of these technologies really create a brain work out!

Further complicating things are building and district policies related to technology. For instance district hired substitutes are not allowed access to the computers, meaning smartboards as well. This limits the types of lessons that a teacher can leave for substitutes, not best teaching practices! Two years ago a Science/media project was started and all of the involved teachers were given Mac computers to use throughout the project, flipcams to share with their students and encouraged to integrate all of these applications they were learning about into their classrooms. The teacher in my building who did this project was not allowed to utilize her computer at school because our tech team did not support Macs - we do not have any in the building actually. She was discouraged with every project she came up with.

All of the work produced by the curriculum writing team is posted in an online program called ANGEL - this is sort of like Blackboard. The curriculum material is posted in a repository where all staff members across the district have access. The next problem is getting those teachers to access and utilize the materials! Many teacher do not realize that they have access let alone that all of their classes are loaded so that a teacher could use ANGEL to post course material, make a class calender and many other things.
Heads up to those of you in OPS, we will be dealing with another technology change this fall when infinite campus morphs into a standards based grades format rather than the patch job from points based that we used this year.

Technology will continue to challenge all teachers, both those who resit technology and those who embrace it. The best thing that we can do is to try and grow with it, but also know enough to adjust when the server goes out, the smartboard locks up or online lesson plans disappear!