Gilmore's Blog - CI 5342

e-learning: Fingertips...

"... with sufficent access and support, teachers will be better able to ...."

Let me start by saying that besides access and support, teachers need more incentive. Especially older teachers who have been doing it the same way for numerous years. Why change now?

There's a lot of good technology out there, but to really make it work effectively we need to sell the teachers on it. You also have to spend a lot. The problem is that teachers aren't impressed with what they've seen so far. All it takes is one time when the teacher makes plans to have their students work in the lab on a research project, and they find out the server is down. With technology, teachers always need to have a "plan B". That makes for a lot of extra work that teachers don't have time for.

For teachers to be willing to integrate technology into their curriculum, they need to be very comfortable with it. In most cases I've seen, the school doesn't have time or resources allocated to really train teachers. There may be a one day workshop during the fall inservice days, but not enough to get teachers confident about using it regularly. There also needs to be curriculum ideas they can easily access, because teachers don't have the time to develop new lessons.

The 5 goals they discuss sound nice, but making them happen is going to take a lot of time and money.