I can think of three great challenges for leveraging technology to empower student learning.  Those challenges are time, consistent access, and understanding what is out there.  There are ways to overcome all three, but they remain challenges nonetheless.

The challenge of time includes both a teacher’s personal time and classroom time.  Developing meaningful lessons that incorporate technology can take a significant amount of preparation.  These lessons generally take more in-class time also, which can be scary for teachers who already feel pressed for class time.

A second challenge is consistent access.  In my experiences, I have always had to share technology that I can put into student’s hands amongst all other teachers in the school.  This is difficult for a few reasons.  One, you have to sign up for this technology far in advance which limits the ability to alter lessons or take extra time.   I also run in to the issue of not being ready to do the lesson when the time arrives.  There is also a learning curve for every technology.  Not having consistent access means that more class time has to be spent learning and relearning how to use the technology.

Finally, knowing what tools are available is a challenge.  When I say tools, I mean software and applications.  Finding useful technologies that suit your lesson needs can be painstakingly difficult.  I perform web searches about once a month looking for tools that would be useful for my classroom and I still run into things like Aurasma that I had never heard of.

I find these three challenges to be the most difficult in incorporating technology effectively.  However, I do think that effective teachers succeed in trying to overcome these challenges.  For example, to combat the lack of consistent access,  I use technology that incorporates smartphones which students already have.  What would you do to meet the challenges of time, consistent access, and understanding what is available? What other challenges would you add to the list?