Five ways to improve technology in education

Filed under: Features

Five ways to improve technology in education

by Todd Ritter Feb 12th 2008

I was fortunate enough to see David Pogue's keynote on the opening day of the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference this Monday in Hershey, PA. PETE&C is a state-wide conference aimed at bringing together school technology directors, teachers, principals, IT professionals, and vendors to advance the state of technology in education.

While listening to Pogue briefly touch on many emerging trends and technologies like VoIP, improved text-to-speech, "Web 2.0" sites, and ubiquitous wireless, it became clear from the audience gasps and collective jaw-dropping that educators are not keeping up with technology changes. Demonstrations of technologies that have been around for more than two years were causing the educators to feverishly put pen to paper so they can take things like Skype back to their schools to use in the curriculum.

It's important for our educators to understand and adapt new technologies so that students can benefit from read/write instruction instead of a stale, read-only education. To help them along, here are five ways to improve technology in education:

Stay informed
Use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to keep up with technology news and events. To use RSS you'll need an RSS reader like Google Reader, NetNewsWire (Mac), or FeedDemon (Windows) to read RSS feeds. An RSS feed is basically a dynamic link that updates your RSS reader when new content is posted to a website (click the "RSS Feeds" button under our search bar to see examples).

You can also subscribe to technology newsletters, and talk to students about websites and web services they use on their own. A majority of teachers do not know what Stickam or Meebo are, yet these sites are used daily by many of their students.

Focus on the learning process, not the end product
When little Susie uses iMovie to create a video of her class field trip to Cape Canaveral, she should be evaluated on what she's learned through the creative process, not how many wipes and sound effects she used in her final movie file. The quality and relativity of the still pictures she took by learning how to use a digital camera, or video footage from a well-designed storyboard are better barometers of a successful project.

Work with IT professionals who understand education
I work on the IT side of education daily, and I know it's important to unfetter technology at a school to stimulate the learning process. IT staff must be willing to bend on certain security measures and trust students with equipment so that they can be creative and not boxed in. We let students take laptops home to work on approved projects, which ultimately motivates their peers to do the same. We also have a dedicated instructional adviser who helps teachers integrate technology into their lesson plans. This often helps ease the teachers' modification of antiquated lessons.

Become a user
Make a Facebook account so you can understand the allure of social-networking sites. Add some information about yourself. Locate former school pals. Join some groups. This will let you see sites like Faceook from a student's perspective.

To collaborate and share course materials, you can create a Moodle site for your class, or start a class blog. Students benefit more from teachers who collaborate and less from teachers who force-feed lectures. Also, it's much easier to teach about something that you've actually used in depth. It's time to break the stigma of "those that can, do; those that can't, teach."

Don't be afraid of change
Some teachers think that upgrading from Office 2003 to 2007 is using the latest technology. However, a Word document is still words and formatting meant for someone to read. Instead of being satisfied with word processing in a new version of software, why not let students create a school "newspaper" on something like Joomla. The news could be updated in seconds, it could be interactive (comments, updates, etc.), and it could include user-submitted media. Google Earth could be used to give an elementary student global perspective by flying in from a world view down to the roof of his home.

If educators can step out of the education bubble to incorporate real-world technology into their lessons, students will greatly benefit. Instead of avoiding new technologies either because of misinformation or fear of change, educators should embrace change to prepare students for life after organized education.

Tags: education, school, teachers, technology, Technology in Education, TechnologyInEducation, tweet-this

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Scott said 8:52PM on 2-12-2008

Gold Star for You! This is what I and the 7 other Nerdy Teachers preach to other teachers we work with on a daily basis- sometimes it's to deaf ears (resistance to change) and sometimes in falls on smiling faces and nodding heads! Glad to see this post!

Victor Agreda, Jr. said 9:47PM on 2-12-2008

Agreed. We do students a disservice by fearing change. While I can understand a certain amount of resistance (anyone who lived through the bubble of promise that was VRML can regale you with hours of misspent training on that turkey), I don't see why services like Google are mistrusted. Laziness?

Perhaps it is just human nature.

Still, this is a terrific jumping-off point for evangelizing tech in education. And NOT just "tech for tech's sake" which we saw way too much of in the 90's. This is real, it is useful, it is the future. Better get in it now.

Stuart Burt said 9:13AM on 2-13-2008

Many schools around the nation are starting 1-1 initiatives. We are one of those schools. We went with Apple because of their amazing Professional Development. They emphasize what you can do with the machine, not just how great a machine it is. They also encourage the use of Web 2.0 programs.

I recently attended TCEA, and it was great to attend workshops to get more ideas for webapps and open source software that I could deploy. Here are some that we use:

tuxpaint.org
pbwiki.com
manybooks.net
bubbl.us
openphoto.net
websnapr.com

Jamus said 10:24AM on 2-13-2008

One other thing to think about is that some IT depts are reluctant to push users to these outside web apps due to them being held accountable to the users who encounter "questionable material".

Classic example... A communications class posted their book review online only to have it show up in Google Video right next to drunken clubbers shouting profanity. Department head gets a call and the next thing you know the IT contact for their department is getting chewed out about the whole thing. The IT girl did not have any control over what else would be posted on the Google Video site, but she got blamed anyway and told how bad it made the university look. It is things like THAT which make some in EDU IT reluctant to having their users use new open web apps.

oran said 10:52PM on 2-13-2008

There are hosts of factors that have been affecting the pace of school classrooms as they try to keep up with technology. Often, a statement such as 'we have computers in every classroom' really translates to a 386 era PC, with the software that came out with it and a 1200 baud modem. Plus, there's simply no way to convince school boards that they should replace PCs with new ones at the same rate as any local business does. Many teachers do try to stay in step with change, but they often feel so isolated from other personnel and chained down to responsibilities for their 20 to 30 students every minute they are at school. Teachers have only minutes a day where they work when they can be free of that special responsibility to do anything else at all.
Clearly, all sides who seek changes in schools need to be aware of and respectful towards the job stresses amd restrictions of all concerned. Such conflicts as these have really been going on much too long, yielding only the rare and spectacular changes that only affect a few students.

James M. said 9:34AM on 3-10-2008

I teach high school English. I agree with all of your suggestions, but In think your choice of tone does you a disservice.

We teachers are really quite busy, and many of us don't know about Skype or RSS or Moodle not because we're dinosaurs with pea-sized brains, but because we do not have the time to keep up.

We need to reach towards you, but you need to reach towards us too, and I don't think insulting us will help.

Grant Robertson said 10:33AM on 2-13-2008

Where in this post did he insult you? I've re-read it twice and I can't find a single insulting word.

Todd Ritter said 12:02PM on 2-13-2008

Perhaps James sniffed out my underlying disappointment with some teachers not giving an effort to use technology. For instance, I just installed a new multifunction (copy/scan/fax) unit in a workroom of an elementary school. A teacher walks in while I'm setting up LDAP for scan-to-email and literally stands 5 feet away from the unit with fear on her face "oh no! a new copier! is the old one still hooked up somewhere for me to use?" So she didn't even take the time to approach the machine, read the menu options, or attempt a single copy before avoiding the 5 minute learning curve.

Obviously not all teachers are like this, but these examples are what may make my tone seem offensive. I do not intend to insult teachers (my father is one!) or the hard work they do. I do, however, dislike resistance to change in general when they are teaching our future doctors, lawyers, politicians, IT professionals, etc.

James M. said 9:44AM on 3-10-2008

I was thinking in particular of the very clever but not exactly flattering picture of the dinosaurs. Also, the descriptions in the first paragraph of teacher whose jaws hit the floor about two-year old technology was a subtextual dig at us.

But as I said, I agree with all of Mr. Ritter's points, and in general, I think this site is great. (I'm back here today because I just read the tip about how to get Firefox to spellcheck text fields, which is fantastic information.) No real offense taken.

J.

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