Techlearning blog

Teachers, like the students in classrooms, come from all different perspectives when it comes to technology integration. Each comes to work each day or to a professional development seminar with a different set of schema for using technology, and therefore unique needs when it comes to their personal learning journey.

I've been reminded of this several times in the past year. Last fall, when I shared a workshop on "Enhanced Search Strategies" for teachers at a Wichita Falls, Texas, regional technology workshop, I was amazed the session had over 100 attendees and was standing-room only. Many teachers and librarians are helping students research on the web every week, as well as using the Internet themselves as a research tool, so this topic was extremely relevant and of interest to that audience. More recently, in a Women of Web 2.0 interview last week, Sharon Peters asked about suggestions to help teachers "move along" in their use of instructional technologies beyond the entry-level uses of word processing and presentation software. Both of these events, along with several others the past few months, reminded me of the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow Research (ACOT) from the 1980s. ACOT concluded teachers progress through a series of stages when they integrate technology into their curriculum, and everyone starts (at some point) at a very basic, entry level approach:

Last week at the MACE conference in Manhattan, Kansas, keynote speaker (and amazing educator) Marco Torres reminded attendees that teachers really have three choices when it comes to how they respond to challenges in the classroom environment: Teachers can quit, they can complain, or they can innovate. Of these choices, innovation is certainly the preferable option. If that is true, a vital question for educational leaders of all flavors then becomes, "How do we encourage our teachers to innovate?" We need broad-based innovation in education, not merely small "pockets" of innovation here and there when the personality of the teacher happens to fit well with technology integration.

I think we need to understand and respect the "stages" of technology integration which teachers tend to follow as they use technology, but we also need to have a vision at both the administrative and teacher levels for advancing beyond "fill the pail" transmission-based education with our students. Technology leadership is vital. As I shared with Sharon and the other participants in the WOW2 interview last week, we need every principal to require his/her teachers to complete at least one Internet-collaborative project each semester with students. Note I am not saying, "each teacher should go to the computer lab and do a project with students." That was a good goal for teachers in the late 1990s. Those projects often ended up at the "adaptation" stage of ACOT, however, focusing on the production of a student project like a PowerPoint slideshow. Now with the nearly ubiquitous availability of the Internet in U.S. schools and websites like ePals which facilitate collaborative classroom projects, we need classroom teachers moving beyond the ACOT "adaptation" phase and into the higher levels of appropriation and invention.

We need to encourage more teachers to innovate. Without administrative leadership, innovation in schools tends to remain sparse. That needs to change, and the change doesn't have to wait for a legislative pendulum change. If administrators would expect and require teachers to do an Internet-based collaborative project as part of their regular, annual evaluation process, more teachers would do them. We need to stop going to the teachers and asking them to change education, or waiting for our legislatures to change their often harmful, myopic focus on high-stakes testing and summative assessments. I think the real power to change our schools lies with students and with parents. If students are excited about learning in an Internet-collaborative project, and if parents learn about that and get supportive, I think both groups can do more to encourage and support the pedagogical advancement of teachers in technology integration than their administrator or any professional development exercise. Tools like the LoTi can help teachers assess their own current "stage" of technology use (or " stages," since individuals may progress along different pathways depending on the content and context) as well as inform principals and superintendnets about where teachers are in their own personal learning journeys with digital technologies.

Changing a culture is difficult, and the culture of schools is no exception. How can we better encourage our teachers to innovate and learn more sophisticated ways to effectively engage students in the learning process with digital technologies? There are no silver bullets, but encouraging them and their students to collaborate with others via the web is a good suggestion that needs to be tried by more administrative leaders. Technology integration should not mean simply fancy PowerPoints and lots of video clips shown to students in the classroom. Those uses of technology can be more engaging and beneficial than some alternatives, but we shouldn't stop at merely digitizing the transmission-based education experience for our students. Learners need to remix their learning and use technologies to both explore and represent their understandings of complex ideas. Additionally, learners need to regularly collaborate with others outside the four walls of their traditional classroom as well as within them. Without administrative leadership changes, we won't see many students and teachers doing those things in the months and years ahead. (At least during school hours.)