The Classroom Teacher's Technology Survival Guide

Doug Johnson

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118183557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

A comprehensive guide for integrating educational technology in the K-12 classroom

This is a must-have resource for all K-12 teachers and administrators who want to really make the best use of available technologies. Written by Doug Johnson, an expert in educational technology, The Classroom Teacher's Technology Survival Guide is replete with practical tips teachers can easily use to engage their students and make their classrooms places where both students and teachers will enjoy learning.

• Covers the most up-to-date technologies and how they can best be used in the classroom
• Includes advice on upgrading time-tested educational strategies using technology
• Talks about managing "disruptive technologies" in the classroom
• Includes a wealth of illustrative examples, helpful suggestions, and practical tips

This timely book provides a commonsense approach to choosing and using educational technology to enhance learning.

Chapter One

Why Should Classroom Teachers Be Technologically Skillful?

U.S. schools spend billions of dollars on educational technology each year. While education budgets shrink, classroom sizes grow, accountability measures skyrocket, and teacher salaries remain stagnant, one has to wonder if this huge investment in wires, motherboards, and things that go beep in the night is actually improving schools' effectiveness.

I don't know that anyone has the definitive answer. It depends on whom you ask, what is being measured, and how educational “effectiveness” is defined. There is a good deal of research out there, little of it conclusive and much of it sponsored by those who have a financial interest in its outcome. Critical writings abound, including the Alliance for Childhood's Fool's Gold report (2000); Jane Healey's book Failure to Connect (1999); and Larry Cuban's book Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2003). Admittedly, these references are a bit dated, but they raise valid arguments in terms of the monetary investment in educational technology versus the lack of evidence-based research on the outcomes.

What's a classroom teacher to think? Are personal investment in technology and the hours it takes to learn about it worthwhile? One may not have a choice.

In her book In the Age of the Smart Machine from way back in 1989, professor Shoshana Zuboff presciently described two distinct types of impact technology has on the workplace: automating and informating. The first thing businesses do is automate with information technologies, taking standard operations and making them faster, more accurate, and less labor intensive. But the real power of technology, Zuboff argues, is evident when it starts allowing organizations and individuals to do things that would not be possible without it.

Confused? Let's look at some examples from education:

• Electronic grade books automate the functions of the good old red booklets, allowing grades to be calculated, class lists imported, and grades exported to the student information system. But when the grade book is made Web-accessible to parents, they can monitor their children's progress in real time and intervene long before the conference at the end of the first grading period. Some systems even e-mail parents when their child receives a failing grade on a test. That's informating.
• Moving worksheets and tutorials onto the computer screen automates drill and practice teaching, enhancing it with immediate feedback and engaging sounds and visuals. In informated programs the tests and tutorials serve as a means of formative testing, giving the teacher the knowledge of precisely which skills individual students need to learn (ideally before the next big state test).
• The traditional “stand and deliver” lecture that is common in so many classrooms can be automated by enhancing it with a well-designed presentation that might include clarifying photographs, diagrams, and highlighted key concepts. Multimedia production tools informate the educational process when students themselves use them to communicate the results of constructivist-based learning activities that require higher-level thinking skills and original solutions to problems.
• Computers in labs, libraries, and classrooms automate the standard educational practices of writing, computation, and research. Small communication devices wirelessly connected to networks, such as laptops and handheld computers, informate the learning environment, allowing their student users anytime, anyplace access to resources, learning opportunities, experts, and each other. These devices have the potential of providing individualized instructional programs to every child, not just those identified as having special needs. Aren't we all, to some extent, learners with “special needs”?

Just as technology has reshaped the business sector over the last two decades, it is reshaping the educational landscape in powerful ways and will continue to do so at an accelerated pace.

Revolution or Evolution in Educational Change?

Easy to do is easy to say.

Attitude plays a major part in any change effort. (I know, “Well, duh!”) Geoffrey Moore, in his book Inside the Tornado (2004), neatly divides people implementing new technologies into visionaries and pragmatists, and suggests we need to work with each group differently (p. 18):

Visionaries	Pragmatists
Intuitive	Analytic
Support revolution	Support evolution
Contrarian	Conformist
Break away from the pack	Stay with the herd
Follow their own dictates	Consult with colleagues
Take risks	Manage risks
Motivated by future opportunities	Motivated by present problems
Seek what is possible	Pursue what is probable

After years of living in denial, I must come clean. I am a pragmatist. Perhaps I was once a visionary, but having worked with real people, contended with real technologies, and been employed by real schools for the past thirty years, I am now a full-fledged pragmatist.

Survival tip: As a former classroom teacher and librarian and as a current technology director, I understand the apprehension about technology felt by many compete...