Week 2: Technology Assessments

The use of campus and teacher surveys to assess the technological literacy of educators is a vital tool to determine where growth has occurred and is still needed.  In reviewing our campus results, it was insightful to see where the individual scores changed from year to year based on the participants input.  It would be interesting to also view the staff demographics for each year assessed and see how many of the participants were first time teachers vs. teachers with more than 5 years experience along with age groupings of the participants.  Younger teachers, just out of college, often have stronger technology backgrounds.  Being able to view these additional staff demographics would provide an extra layer of clarity in analyzing the trends.  Understanding these annual trends show campus strengths and weaknesses and aid with future planning for staff development, budgeting, and continued alignment with campus, district and state goals.

To continue with technological growth, campus and district leaders must keep pace with the development of technology and visibly support its use on campus.

As a dyslexia therapist, I am very limited with the use of technology with my students due to the fidelity of the curriculum I teach and the manner in which it must be delivered.  However, I strongly advocate for the regular use of technology for my students in the classroom.  If my students have access to an itouch or iphone, I help them locate apps they can be used to facilitate spelling, speech to text, and math computation.  I encourage my students to use calculators for computation.  After getting my teachers and/or campus leaders to understand the need for these tools, my students are usually allowed to use these tools.  However, there is often little to no instruction provided for the student in how the tools can be used to simplify the student’s work.  It is simply assumed that the student will know how to use the tool within the context of their learning.  This is frustrating but illustrates how technology integration is breaking down at a very fundamental level.  These tools are there to help our kids.  However, instruction must be modeled and include opportunities for use so that the student associates technology as a tool for learning and not just a random app or cool gadget.

It is difficult to change  “old school” ideas that view technology as a luxury, an extravagance, or even a distraction for learning.  There are still many teachers in the classroom that do not integrate technology into their instruction as they could because they believe that they “turned out fine” without the use of technology so their students will also “be fine” learning without the use of integrated technology.   This is frustrating.  Only through continued technological assessments, strong leadership, staff development, and state TEK requirements will this change.