Friday, December 20, 2013

Educating Teachers in the Latest Technologies

By Sean Scarpiello

With all of the new technology being released into the market for education, it is easy to think that simply bringing these latest technologies into the classroom will make a difference. As a result, school districts often find that the technology that they spend thousands of dollars on do not return such a great bang for their buck. Therefore, some schools have become hesitant towards buying new technologies because they have fallen short of their high expectations in the classroom. While technology is extremely important in the classroom, it is vital that teachers are adequately trained to use the technologies being implemented in class.

In my experience, I have seen a lot of cutting edge technology which has consistently been proven to benefit students in different studies become a letdown in some of my own classrooms. During high school, my school district bought a handful of the newly released Promethean Smart Boards and I was fortunate enough to have one of these Smart Boards to use in class. Unfortunately, my teacher was not up to date with the new technology. As he had taught classes the same way for many years, he was more familiar with traditional forms of learning and had really avoided a lot of technology that was more advanced than Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. During class, my classmates and I tried guiding him through the instructions of how to use the Smart Board which was also an unfamiliar technology to us. Overall, we discovered that the Smart Board took too much of our valuable class time to figure out, so we resorted to returning to the technologies that we knew how to use effectively and efficiently.

In retrospect, it is obvious that had our teacher been trained in all of the uses of the Smart Board, the class would extract many more benefits from the Smart Board. In light of this, such technology placed our teacher in a difficult position because he had to address all of the needs of his students, grade homework and tests, follow the curriculum, and try to integrate this confusing technology into a short amount of class time. As there was little time in class already and the figuring out how to work the Smart Boards wasted this time, it was simply too difficult for the teacher. Therefore, the Smart Boards lost out to the other issues the teacher had to address.

However, if teachers were instructed through seminars or workshops that instruct teachers on how to use these new technologies efficiently and effectively in class, we would definitely see greater benefits in class from these technologies. Furthermore, while it may be expensive to send teachers to classes to be trained in these technologies, it is well worth it. If school districts allow for a decent percentage of their budget for new technologies to be directed towards the instruction of teachers to use these technologies, school districts can avoid experiences like the one I described above. These workshops can be scheduled to train teachers over summer breaks or additional days off during the school year and would count towards a teacher's professional development hours. Simply giving a teacher the latest cutting edge technology and asking them to implement it in class instantly is just too difficult because teachers have so many other things to address during the regular school week.

While it is often easy to spend money on the latest technology to bring it into the classroom, it is apparent that the implementation of this technology is only as good as the knowledge that the teacher has regarding such technology. Therefore, it would be wise for schools to spend more on training teachers and less on the actual technology. And while this may mean fewer classrooms are equipped with the latest and greatest technology, the classrooms that have these technologies are getting a lot of bang for their buck. This means students can receive a much higher quality of education through the efficient and effective implantation of technology in education.


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