The Technology Question

When I was compiling essays for The Pressures of Teaching, I was on the lookout for essays about technology because I knew that technology in the classroom was a source of pleasure – and pressure. A technology teacher promised an essay about the necessity of technology for teaching for the future and not the past. Another teacher submitted an essay regarding his work creating a visual exchange between two schools which crossed urban and suburban lines. Another wrote about how she created all her lessons on power point and had them at the touch of a button.

But digging deeper into conversations with these and other teachers revealed certain pressures: that the availability of technology has changed ever corner of the educational landscape whether its a new found ability to capture student learning in the form of longitudinal data or the way teachers deliver content in the classroom or the way students express their learning. There is the ever present sense hat we know what we’re teaching now or what we are teaching with will be obsolete very quickly; that its nearly impossible to keep up with the what’s new and newly available. There is an internal pressure of looking for the next big thing; to catch the wave, and the right wave, to be the best prepared. And none of this, not one shred of this, is related to the testing movement in which we are compelled to live and teach by.

Technology is transforming the very definition of what it means to be educated. It is changing the definition of literacy.  

Then there are the mounting practical issues of technology use in school that pressures classroom teachers: do schools have enough money to purchase computers or smart phones or I-pads or e-readers and to fund a top to bottom school-wide initiative? And how does a school pay for what may go wrong, the breakage, the loss, equipping a transient population? What do we do when the internet goes down in school, in the middle of a lesson or presentation? Or there's not enough room on the WI FI band? Or if the computer or entire system succumbs to a virus? A power outage? Personnel disputes that have developed over the lack of electrical power in the circuitry?

In my own school, we faced internet interruptions, temperamental WI FI, outdated machines, blown circuits and we didn’t have one or two people to serve as our technology specialists – those who knew what to do when systems or machines went down.

In his essay that appeared in the collection of The Pressures of Teaching, Fred Haas, the technology liaison for the Boston Writing Project, claims schools and businesses operative differently and therefore technology initiatives have a different character. He writes, in his essay, False Starts and Failures: In Search of a New Model for Integrating Technology into the Classroom that schools are not businesses and cannot be run like businesses.

School leaders need to have a system-wide technology vision, something difficult to implement because of the rapidly change availability of applications and software and because funding is often in question or simply not enough to build capacity. Teachers need to be “trained up” as do students. What tasks and projects can students now do with technology that provide meaningful avenues to demonstrate sophisticated critical and creative thinking?

Students need to be trained as well. Recently a group of teachers in my school asked to consider revising the sixth grade curriculum to include instruction on “keyboarding” and creating an e-mail. But by some standards, e-mail is already old technology; those who have been keeping up with changes on Facebook will know that the majority of teenagers now consider e-mail too slow and prefer a hybrid of e-mail with instant messaging. Nonetheless, while teenagers come to school with smart phones, they lack the fuller depth of academic applications.

I was also looking for teachers to write an essay about how cell phones/smart phones had turned the corner schoolyard fist fight into a major brawl by a text gone viral. Or had liberated the bully. Or had given voice to the Mean Generation. Or how cell phones enabled cheating.
At the time I was looking for a teacher to discuss the issues of technology in the classroom, particularly the improper use of Facebook by 11 year olds. I was looking for teachers who, unbeknownst to them, had Facebooks they didn’t create. In my school, sixth graders, were creating unpleasant Facebook pages about teachers, snapping photos of them in classrooms without their knowledge. Suddenly teachers in my school had Facebook pages they didn’t make or authorize or know about. And the new sixth graders had created one for me that alluded to child abuse.

I suppose I should have written that essay myself.

What would your essay have been about?