When something new and innovative comes along in education, there is no consistent prevailing wisdom as to the appropriate response by schools. Should a school jump on the leading edge (which can sometimes be the bleeding edge) or wait and see what other schools are doing? Largely, this depends on the leadership of the school, and their particular view of educational innovations. More progressive school leadership generally prefers to try out new approaches in the interest of their student success or, if in a private school, their bottom line. Conservative districts might wait to see if the expense (and there’s a lot of expense) is worth it versus the return on the investment. Either way, teachers are rarely the ones making these decisions, and that often puts them right in the middle as the ones who must implement, and often that implementation is mandated from on high. Nowhere is this situation more prevalent than in the implementation of technology in schools.
I love tools. I don’t own very many, partly because they are expensive, but mostly because I don’t do a lot of projects that require a lot of tools. For example, the concept of a nice router table is exciting - to be able to round over edges of wood pieces, create ogee curves, or carve out dovetail joints sounds thrilling. The reason I don’t own a router table is because I haven’t needed to do any of those things, so I don’t actually need the router. Carpenters know that you don’t hand someone a fancy tool and expect them to go build something with it. Tool need arises from the project - what are you trying to build, and what tools will best suit your purpose? Educational technology (ed tech) tools are no different.
Why are we surprised when initiatives like 1:1, or Google Apps for Education (GAFE) so often stagnate and fail (with some obvious exceptions), when teachers are mandated to implement them? Sure, you’ll always have the (usually) young, excited teachers who can’t wait to try them out in their classrooms. They try all these new approaches and procedures, and they may have some success, but the school as a whole will just flounder as most teachers try to figure out what they’re supposed to do with the new devices. Instead, it would be so much better for schools to seriously study the goals that their teachers are trying to meet, and then to design a solution that will best serve in the meeting of those goals.
I asked for my classroom set of Chromebooks, not because I wanted to see what I could do with them, but because I needed them to achieve the goals that I had set for myself this year - a more efficient and paperless flipped classroom. I knew going into the year that I was going to have to teach my students both what those goals would look like, as well as how to use the tools to achieve them. Yes, I had to cut some of the content out of my curriculum, but in a private school, this wasn't all that difficult (I do realize that were I a public school teacher, cutting content isn't easy to do).
As my school becomes a 1:1 Chromebook environment, I hope that teachers are allowed to use them as their comfort level and knowledge allows. I hope that the teachers who are reluctant to change their procedures to include the devices are at least willing to explore ways of achieving their goals in different ways. I hope that we are given more time to learn how to leverage the tool for the good of our students. But mostly, I hope that we can improve the learning environment for our students.
