I suppose you might brand me a cynic, but in some respects, teachers using technology in their lessons is akin to Dr Johnson’s dog:

"Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Substitute a different phrase for the unfortunate reference to women preachers, and the observation stands up quite well.

If your job is to coordinate the use of technology in the curriculum, this poses a bit of a problem. You can’t do your job if there is nothing to coordinate, but what if the stuff that people are doing is dull, mundane, and all but worthless?
One example I had to contend with was an English teacher who insisted on the kids polishing up their stories in her classroom, and then using the computer lab for them to type them up. I told her it would be a better use of time and resources for her to give their essays to a part-time typist. That went down like a lead balloon, as you can imagine.
Another teacher, having taken to heart my suggestion that he get his class to use some ed tech instead of paper worksheets, uploaded his worksheets to the school intranet and took his class into the computer lab. And there they logged in, pulled up the relevant worksheet on their screens, and carried on working as per usual.

None of this is made any better by some principals insisting that teachers have their computers on, or their whiteboards on, all the time. In a job interview, for a Tech Coordinator post, when the Principal asked me if I had any questions, I asked him what his criteria of my success would be.

He replied:

“I want to see people banging on the doors of the computer lab, demanding to be let in.”

Well, that’s easily achieved: All I’d have to do is make sure the door was kept locked all the time.

What all of these things have in common are the following characteristics:

• Quantity takes precedence over quality
• Ticking boxes is more important than doing something of real value
• There is a profound lack of understanding of where educational technology can be put to good use…
•  … And where it is better left out of the equation altogether.

In my opinion, the best way to ensure that students get a decent experience of using education technology is to go for quality, and to encourage other teachers to do so. In order to do so, it helps to have a deep understanding oneself of what computers can be used for. Here are some suggestions, by way of an example:

(Before looking at specific activities, it’s worth taking some time to consider the sorts of things you can do with computers, or that computers can enhance. The following list is by no means exhaustive, or even extensive, but it should get you thinking along the right lines.)

• Carry out independent research using the internet
• Gather data automatically using a device called a datalogger
• Draft and redraft a piece of writing quickly and without mess
• Use the same information in different documents – and even different software applications – quickly and easily
• Change the sequence of things, such as the items in a set of instructions
• Watch clips of movies or analyze a piece of music
• Experiment with changing aspects of a model, using a spreadsheet or a database
• Experiment with different ways of presenting the same data. For example: “Would a pie chart or a bar chart be more appropriate here?”
• Produce a newsletter or other kinds of finished product
• Create web pages
• Create multimedia presentations
• Query and produce reports from large amounts of data very quickly and accurately

Another approach is to encourage teachers to think about the processes involved in their subjects. For example, forget about history – what do historians do? How might that be replicated in school, using the educational technology available?

And another interesting approach is to eschew the tired, traditional approaches, like using a spreadsheet for mathematics and a word processor for English. What about doing things another way entirely?

For example:

• Use a spreadsheet to record the number of jokes in a book, and where they occur; ditto the more serious bits. If you try that on a book like The Picture of Dorian Gray, you get some really interesting results. By plotting such data on a graph, you get a very clear picture (literally) of the structure of the book. I cannot claim credit for that idea: I saw it in a journal nearly 20 years ago, and I’m sorry I cannot recall the name of the author.
• Use a word processor to describe a mathematical problem and its solution, or simply to write out in words what expressions like 54% mean.
  

I firmly believe that the only way to embed the use of educational technology in the curriculum in the long term is to get teachers to use it in a purposeful, high quality way. That requires a bit of lateral thinking and risk-taking. Like the title of this piece says: Dare to be different!

Terry Freedman is a U.K.-based education technology consultant and publishes the ICT in Education website at www.ictineducation.org, and the electronic newsletter “Computers in Classrooms."

POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM

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