I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology. The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don’t like or understand technology (whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it…
Technology in schools is NOT a new thing.
I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it’s from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important. No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is “taxiing to the hangar”.
Computers started appearing in classrooms back when I was still at teachers college more than 25 years ago. There has been an expectation from EVERY school, school system and government policy that I’ve worked under in the past 20 years to embed and integrate technology into the education process. Using technology in the learning process, and having some understanding of it and what it enables our students to do, is NOT something that was dreamed up in the last few months, or that appeared suddenly with the DER/BER/<insert acronomyn here>.
I’m so tired of having the integration of technology into learning overlooked because it’s “too hard”. As educators – actual professional educators, who actually go into classrooms every day and teach for a living – we do NOT have the luxury of choosing whether we should be integrating technology, or whether we want to learn more about it, or whether we think it’s relevant to the learning process. It is, it’s part of the job and if people don’t think so, then they ought to be getting a copy of the Saturday paper and looking for a something else to do where they CAN be selective about what part of the job they are willing to take seriously without it impacting on our future generations.
Your government, your state, your diocese, your school system, your school, have all been mandating this technology integration requirement for at least 20 years that I’m aware of. Every school I’ve ever worked for has dedicated many hours and dollars to providing professional development, training, resources and equipment to make it happen. The fact that we are STILL having this conversation about teaching professionals who are not up to speed with this stuff after all this time is downright embarrassing to the profession.
It makes me crazy when I hear people talking about using technology in the classroom as being “hard”, as though it’s also optional. Every job has hard bits, but if they are part of the job, you just learn to do them.
You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.
You Don’t Have To Like It by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
I completely agree with you, but in the context of higher education can we really expect academics to fulfil the role of instructional designers? At the pace that technology is advancing and taking into consideration the myriads of digital tools available can they really keep up? I don’t think so. I think that as subject matter experts they should collaborate with professional instructional designers. They should definitely envisage new possibilities and imagine innovative educational practices, but to proceed they will require the assistance of eLearning experts and educational technologists. Teams of students could also be crowd sourced to contribute to the application of eLearning and share the required cost in effort and time.
I posted something relevant to this in my blog: http://techenlearn.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/teach-teachers-about-teaching.html