How Do We Ensure Our Schools Are Staffed with Technologically Savvy Teachers

Todd Ritter has authored an excellent piece over at DownLoadSquad.com entitled Five Ways to Improve Technology in Education. Ritter begins by describing the response of teachers during the David Pogue keynote at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference. He writes about the many ooohs and aaahs emanating from the audience and rightfully comes to the realization that many educators are not up on all the groundbreaking developments occurring in technology these days.

He then writes, actually quite gently, that it is very important for educators to “understand and adapt new technologies so that students can benefit from read/write instruction instead of a stale, read-only education.” Directly after his assertion, he offers up his “five ways to improve technology in education.”

The Recommendations
Ritter begins with the obvious, the need to keep up to date with the rapid-fire changes. He then does an exceptional job reviewing the process educators can use to stay in touch with the many developments occurring. He then moves on to a second key component, the need to always focus on the process of learning and not the end product. Though this valid point is often missed by educators, this recommendation is enormously important as teachers begin utilizing video and storyboarding techniques with students.

He then moves to the need for a close connection between the IT folks within education and the teachers in the classroom. Perhaps here we find a slight misstep based on an assumption that every district and every school currently employs a person who understands the educational technology piece (many districts still only have nuts and bolts techies who keep the system running).

In wrapping up, his last two recommendations are exceptionally dead on. First to learn technology teachers need to be users themselves. Ritter suggests Facebooking or using Skype with other teachers to create a social network of educators who are both active users of technology as well as sharers of the latest info available. He then finishes with a great concept. His idea, to “Go on Creating,” is modestly detailed yet lies at the heart of the entire issue in our mind. In other words, teachers need to be explorers and creative beasts who constantly create new learning options for students. Not only will children respond positively to teachers who do so, teachers will find their energy and commitment to education growing as they feed off the creative juices the come with such a motto.

One Key Problem
Unfortunately, in many schools and for many teachers, the above five suggestions simply are not happening on a regular basis. But the reason that most teachers are not up-to-date on technology is that they are simply too overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of their existing schedule to be able to stay up with the technological advances that are occurring.

To get a sense, we turn to a comment we received a while back from Mark Riffey, a businessman and the husband of an elementary teacher. In commenting on an article regarding some recommendations we made about improving teacher quality, “Improving Education, It Won’t Happen Until…”, Mr. Riffey wrote,

“Even if teacher pay is doubled, that doesn’t change
the fact that 65 hours is probably the mean.
I know the 6th grade teacher at my house
works substantially more hours than that per
week. Don’t get me wrong, the extra cash
would be nice, but do I see her able
to work 70-80 hours a week for the next
15-20 years? Not really.”

Therein lies the basis of the problem for teachers. While students in other countries spend more time at school than American children do, most teachers in other countries do not have additional instructional responsibilities during that extra time. Instead, time is built into the school day for teachers to collaborate, to prepare lesson materials, and to receive professional development.

For teachers to be able to consistently implement the five recommendations that Ritter makes, there will need to be a massive overhaul of the current expectations for teachers. There will also need to be a massive overhaul of the school schedule, both in terms of the school day and the school year.

It is time that schools offer technological tutorials and professional development opportunities during the school day when the teachers are scheduled for work time. Likewise, there needs to be staff devoted to ongoing professional development, teacher leaders who practice the very recommendations that Ritter espouses, but who are freed up to help others learn to utilize some of these technological advances in their classrooms.

As but one example, in reading Ritter’s piece, he makes reference to the application Joomla and the possibility for teachers to create their own classroom newspaper. In reading that recommendation, we could not help but wonder how many teachers had actually heard of the application. And of those who had heard of it, we could not help but wonder how many teachers could find the time to preview then teach themselves how to utilize the application.

Ritter’s recommendations are solid. But it must be noted that a technologically out-of-date teaching staff is not a function of a lack of interest or effort. Instead, it is a reflection of an out-of-date educational structure and a system that simply does not provide educators reasonable work expectations.

If we are truly committed to improving education, we do need to look at how to help keep teachers on the cutting edge of technology. But to do so, we then must take a look at how we can reasonably implement these suggestions with our teachers.

Photos by malthe and YahooTeachers.