Tech Assessment at My School

After talking with some "tech savvy" colleagues, I quickly realized that even though they think that they are utilizing tech effectively, they are only on rung 1 or 2 of the SAMR model! This is something that I thought given what I had heard from students of mine and how they were being asked to use tech in these classes. Both colleagues sung the praises of Schoology as a platform to use with their students. Schoology provided them a means to use tech to reach students no matter where the students were in the course or if there were physically in school or not. I really felt that after talking to these teachers, their lack of knowledge of the power of actual tech integration was holding them back. I must fault our district partially though. They do provide awesome tech tools to our staff but not the training necessary to know how to affectively utilize and integrate them.

Because of the teachers' lack of knowledge, I found that often the students are way ahead of the teachers in their use of tech. However, these students are often not ahead of the teachers in knowledge of the tech and its possibilities. I found that the teachers were also frustrated at their lack of professional development and feel that they are blindly figuring out how to use all of this tech. As one teacher said: "God bless YouTube tutorials!" That speaks volumes to the problem. How am I or my colleagues ever to reach that magic TPACK triangle consistently?!

We all agree that the infrastructure is in place for successful integration, and we are very lucky and grateful for it, but we lack the basic knowledge of how to use it. Another problem our faculty faces is that we are provided little to no time to collaborate with fellow faculty members. If there are staff members who do know how to effectively integrate tech, the rest of us never get the opportunity to learn from them. This is really a shame.

On another note, in regards to websites being blocked, the teachers that I interviewed and myself all feel that more sites need to be blocked instead of "whitelisted".

One final point that I find odd is that our district, despite the amount of tax dollars spent on tech, does not have a goal or list of goals for using tech in the classroom. I am not sure why that is, but it is. Maybe if we were given goals or directives, it might be helpful to the entire faculty and help facilitate the integration of tech into the curriculum.