I think there are technology challenges that all teachers share – keeping up with them is one that springs quickly to mind.  I like to think that I am pretty informed and that the digital learning experts in my district are on the ball, but I learned way more about technology tools in a few days at NCCAT that I had over the last 5-6 years at other PD opportunities.  Sometimes it’s overwhelming what’s out there and figuring out when/if you can use things in class (or outside of class) to enhance the educational process.

Another challenge I suspect that most of us share is the technologies available across platforms.  I have a PC desktop, a PC laptop, a Chromebook, and an iPad at school (and my smartphone works on an Android platform).  These devices and the platforms don’t always work well together.  We’ve never really had computers for the students (we’re in a unique position at a community college campus), so having enough devices to run the same kind of program/app has been a struggle.  We have had limited access over the years to the community college’s computer labs, but it’s not like we can load software onto their computers.  Last year we started ordering some Chromebooks and hopefully that will help address this issue to some degree, but sometimes the best apps are only operable on iPads, so that can still be an issue.

Ultimately the major technology issue that we have, and one that I’m sure is universal, is expense.  The cost of technology precludes much of it from use.  Even apps that start out free sometimes end up changing into pay ones.  Our district does a good job in some ways of trying to get district licenses for certain items, but then when people don’t use them to their capacity, we drop them.  Other items are just too expensive to even consider.  One of the pieces of software that I’m using this summer is ChemBioDraw.  It’s phenomenal and certainly didn’t exist when I was in school.  It might be more than my students need, but I would love to have it as an option – I just looked up the price and just to get it on one school computer would be $1290 (that’s at a massive discount to the commercial price of $3090).  Alternatively, I could just get a license for one year – at $490/year.  We obviously don’t have the budget for that.

Going to stay positive about all this, though, because my school is in better position than it was a few years ago, and I now know about a lot of free/inexpensive technologies that I didn’t know about before last week!