Blog 4 Access, Adequacy, and Equity in Technology

Blog 4: Access, Adequacy, and Equity in Educational Technology

Researching for our other assignments I became very jealous of what other school districts were doing at their schools. I’ve read technology plans from other districts, and thought about their technology benchmarks they intended to meet with their tech plan for the state. Then I looked at my district. I’ve taught 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th grades in our district. I’ve even taught K-3rd computers. I was one of the teacher representatives that worked on our district’s tech plan for the state. No way is our district near other similar districts in technology or achieving our benchmarks. We have the technology, but most teachers use it. It is sad the different levels of technology literacy I encounter the in 8th graders I teach. Is it our goal to teach content or technology or both?

Based on the findings on Technology Access which category does my classroom fall into? I have two computers in my room. Both of the computers are my computers; one the school gives each teacher and the other one is my own laptop from home. Our school has approximately 120 computers in our media center which are always in use. computers for 800 students. They are on rolling carts to be signed out as a needed basis. Unfortunately many of the computers are not in working order and since we have more than 30 students in a class we are always scrounging around or doubling up. Then you also have to deal with the computer hogs. We all know who they are. There are only 5 computers in our media center which are always in use. I feel our district gets a gold star for teacher use in school and from home. They make shareware available for us to access our homework site and email from home by giving us personal computers we transfer to and from school.

I agree with the article that for technology to become a reliable tool we all must have access in the classroom at that teachable moment. However, do you really need a computer for every student in your classroom? Schools that have one-to-one computers are getting away from them because of student misusing the technology for game playing, emailing, or internet searching during class. Students were forgetting them at home and the repair were insurmountable is the district. We researched interactive whiteboards. They motivate and engage students the same way computers do. Wouldn’t technology funds be better spent to reach a larger population?

Our software and internet access in our district is adequate. Our district is all wire-less and our tech repair team does a great job. I would rate our school very high on this issue. The software is adequate for the average student but below average for the special needs. This year I had a blind student in class and he had a software program that was suppose to read to him. Not once did it work correctly. As far as training, we would score low. We do have training for our new teachers before school starts for ½ day covering phones, email and our grading program. If you are a veteran teacher there isn’t any ongoing training. We could improve in this area. The area our district lacks is in curriculum integration with technology. If a student gets a teacher that is afraid of technology then that student will not have technology experiences that entire year. These inequities can be seen when they reach the 8th grade.

After reading the study I was surprised with the findings. I felt my school district was unique in lack of access, equity, and educational. We were above in some areas and behind in others especially in the staff development and integration. We are doing well with buying the technology we need and being able to access the technology. What we need to work on is integrating it into the curriculum in a way that engages and motivates students. I feel teachers could collaborate in developing integrated lessons. We need to change the way we teach. We could meet departmentally once a month to discuss what lessons we did, how we changed them to integrate technology. We could also meet with other departments to see if what they do we could incorporate into our curriculum. The last two years I worked on presentations and integrating United Streaming into all the chapters we teach in social studies. Next year as part of my teacher evaluation I plan to work with another social studies teacher to change the way we present our curriculum by putting even more technology into it. We are developing project based assignments along with scavenger hunts on the internet. We plan to give less teacher directed instruction from the text book and more student directed activities through situated learning activities. Hopefully I will become a change agent in my department.