“Based on your experiences, what are the greatest challenges for leveraging technology to empower learning in your classroom and school?”
First challenge – The inequality of the students that I teach is my fundamental concern. When I hear people say “Almost everyone has a smart phone.” I know that isn’t the way it is with my student population in rural Catawba County. While it is true that lots of kids do bring their own devices to school – and yes, thank goodness, my district does allow students to use our wireless internet with their own devices under the direction and supervision of the teacher – I will still be checking out the lap top carts to make sure all my kids have access and use of technology.
Second challenge – My school uses PC instead of Mac. This might not seem like a challenge to some, but going back to challenge #1 and using the school labs and lap tops, it becomes a challenge (for me) because there are still apps not created for PC that I would like to be able to use, but must wait! Truthfully, that will just give me more time to learn prior to implementation! 🙂
Third challenge – Time in the instructional day seems to get shortened every school year. For the 2012-2013 school year art classes were allotted 41 minutes! Students had 2 minutes between class for travel time, which really wasn’t realistic depending on logistics of their previous class. When I think about using technology for instruction rather than teaching students the technology, I realize there will be a learning curve before we can stop teaching the technology and begin using the technology to teach my content. When considering the extent of my curriculum and the length of my classes, I wonder how on earth will I make all this happen while making every minute of every class period really, really count.
I know there are solutions, or at least, mitigation for each of these challenges, but that wasn’t the prompt- so I save that to roll around in my own head for awhile and leave this by saying if it weren’t for challenges, how would we really grow beyond what we consider our current potential?
Hi Jayne,
I empathize with you on the equity issues of access to technology. I would not want to be a parent who felt obligated / pressured to buy my child a smart phone. What an expense even when you can afford it.
The time given up to learning how to use technology is complicated and unavoidable reality… even for teachers and our own professional development. Before we can learn to use a tool appropriately for instruction we do have to learn how it works.