Mary Burns, a Senior Technology and Professional Development Specialist from Newton, MA wrote an article titled Tools for the Mind for Educational Leadership magazine. In it, Ms. Burns argues that technology has been put on the back burner in many schools across America, mostly due to a lack of infrastructural supports, teacher training, and inaccessibility.
Technology that is used in the classroom is often that of lower order thinking skills, such as creating visuals or cutting and pasting information.
A decade and half ago schools and educators were excited about the prospects of technology integration to broaden students horizons, reach higher order thinking skills, and communicate and contribute to international discussions and forums. Today virtually none of these goals have been reached, and Ms. Burns offers suggestions of how to turn the tide.Reference Points
1. In the 1990’s the potential for instructional technology was seen as a boundless horizon for increasing student learning and developmental cognitive processes.
2. Today however, we lack the funding for training, technology equipment, or research which links technology to student improvement, and hence it’s potential is lagging.
3. Districts focus on teaching teachers the skills to use technology and not how to apply that to higher order thinking.
4. There is an over reliance on visually stimulating or simple software, such as PowerPoint and Word.
5. Classrooms rarely use higher order applications such as spreadsheets, GIS, internet search tools, or databases.
6. Students approach the information they find on the internet in a passive manner, neither questing nor seeking to validate the information.
7. Students need to learn to use technology to create, analyze, and reconstruct what information they know and have to reach deeper levels of understanding.
8. Teachers need more time and funding for professional development to help their students with these tools and to create educational technology leadership.
9. We need to stop focusing on the tools we have, and instead focus on how those tools can help our students.
10. Technology should be approached with the product of what we want our students to learn in mind, and use the tools to build up that that goal.
Reflection
Wow. Yes, I often feel exactly as Mary Burns does about technology. That the tools are phenomenal but our ability to use them is not. I recently showed some amazing time lapse GIS data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The images illustrated the melting of ice over Greenland since the 1960’s. I tried for a long time to explain what we were looking at, but the power of the images was lost on the students. They couldn’t comprehend how those data sets were tied together, and how much work it must have taken to do so. I’m tempted and inspired to have them build a similar scenario, but baffled by how to do so. Do we even have that type of software in the schools? Am I qualified to pull that off? If the students have questions, will I be able to help them?
But the potential is there. A colleague of mine raved about how useful using CBL’s to graph data were, because they showed in real time how graphs were formed using actual data, not just some abstract numbers from a book. But do all teachers have access to the technology? I recently tried to arrange the laptop cart for a lesson on cell organelles, but found they were booked for the next two weeks that period by an English teacher, using them to write essays on Word. Here’s my suggestion, make every other week each teacher in the school has a scheduled computer lab day, and teachers can trade or swap if need be.
Ah, and the dreaded PowerPoint. I remember seeing an article in the paper about 5 years ago, when a teacher used PP to show that
-I hate it.
-I hate it.
-I hate it.
It reduces our knowledge to fragments, and hones our artistic instead of cognitive skills.
But why do science teachers get the brunt of this workload? The examples Ms. Burn’s used were all from science (short of one linear algebra example). Teachers need more time for a lot of things, and one of them is collaboration. Schools have a lot of work ahead of them technologically; to integrate, develop, and promote technology are among the top priorities. It’s a tall order, but if we continue to keep our technology expansion with higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind, we can move mountains.
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