Teachers Learn to Use New Technology
Technology is the wave of the future and so are our children. So how do we get the two to work together? Tax payers are paying millions of dollars for schools to put computers, interactive whiteboards, and digital projectors into the classrooms and studies are showing that there is little effect. The problem is not the technology but more the teachers that are given it. Most teachers who receive an interactive whiteboard or new PC in there classroom do not know how to use it, or refuses to adapt it into their learning program. Some schools are starting to change this by having their teachers take training courses over the summer. William Smith, Cabell County Superintendent, said “We are heavily invested in classroom and instructional technology. We have Whiteboards and Elmos and telecommunication capabilities, but the key to the success is the training and support.” He also said teachers, “must be able to walk into the classroom on the day after training with identical equipment ready to go.” Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn also writes in their article, “How Do We Transform Our Schools?,” about how not only schools, but almost every company falls into this process of adding new technology with out the training. They wrote, “That schools have gotten little back from their investment in technology should come as no surprise. Virtually every organization does the same thing schools have done when implementing an innovation. An organization’s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is the predictable course, the logical course — and the wrong course.”
[via Herald Dispatch]
