School, Teacher, Student Web Pages:
Schools now have the opportunity to gear up for the tremendous educational possibilities that sharing and collaboration through the web can provide them. As yet they are largely unorganized in any attempts and lacking a vision of  the incredible potential this medium has to offer virtually any area of education. In addition, many schools do not have policies in place to address web page issues and are unprepared to accommodate such production immediately.
Ethical Concerns:
Schools and teachers are under tight budgets. Teachers are often new to the use of computer software and, as a result, many are relatively unaware of the serious nature of copyright infringement when they try to make a single license support many computers. While this practice may remain relatively invisible within a single classroom, publishing to the web makes copyright and licencing highly visible to the world. It is also vital to inform these people of security concerns pertaining to student names and pictures when publishing on a web site.
Administrator Technology Awareness:
This issue is largely ignored when it comes to K-12 technology integration. School administrators are vital to the direction and strength of any educational program within a district and its individual buildings. They are undoubtedly the force that sets the educational expectations within their buildings. Programs are needed to help them become knowledgeable in technology issues and capabilities so that they can provide expectations to which teaching staff can aspire.
Where Schools and Teachers Stand Technologically:
 With the full schedule, planning, and the large numbers of students that teachers must work with daily, it is difficult for most to devote additional time to becoming productive with technology. Yet this is what schools need in order to have their programs truly adapt to current and future job skill and higher education demands. Most teachers lack the confidence and understanding to really use computer technology as a daily teaching tool. They quickly learn that when they try something new with a computer, it rarely happens without numerous glitches. This can be especially true for teachers trying to teach from the computer, using it to demonstrate concepts, or having students use computers to accomplish similar things themselves. In order for teachers to fully integrate computer technology into their teaching methodologies, they must become proficient and confident users themselves. A small percentage of teachers are comfortable innovators, adapting to working out technological problems. Most, however, will adopt technology only if they know it contains a package that is complete, tested and ready to use. For the majority that aren't innovators and technological problem solvers, reluctance to put themselves in a situation where they must depend on it is only natural. This acceptance problem is especially crucial as schools begin to encourage teachers to explore using the Web as a major delivery vehicle for course content. Teachers need to be shown how multimedia and web page production can become part of course content curriculum. This amounts to a new paradigm for most teachers -- that full technology integration into curricula both requires and allows for a different method of content introduction and development, as well as the development of new authentic assessment modes in order to meet current content standards within traditional time constraints.
What is Needed:
The issue of content standards and benchmarks follow teachers today whenever they search for a new text, and each year when testing scores are published. Computer technology, properly applied to interactive and online lesson production, can help provide many solutions to the problem of aligning course materials to accepted benchmarks. Most textbooks are essentially a static document with little effort given to real alignment issues. Teachers are the experts in understanding what their students really need in order to be successful within given benchmarks, but many lack sufficient understanding of technology's power to think within this new paradigm. Teachers need to be asked to step out of their current teaching mode and to start to "think digital while acting analog."1 Interactive materials on the web and multimedia authoring software can finally empower them to produce exactly what they need with a very specific focus to precisely meet such benchmarks.
Training with multimedia, video, web production software, ethical issues, and administrator awareness are needed on a regular basis. Such training could take the form of regularly scheduled inservice, enabling teachers and administrators to lessen the need for additional time commitments. Many schools as yet have not begun to design such scheduled training time blocks, except in short and infrequent small informational presentations.
The most effective method, however, is one on one coaching/mentoring involving a team approach, both for venturing into new areas of technology use and for troubleshooting current use problems. This involves some restructuring of daily teaching loads and schedules at times so that teaching peers can form teams of their choice. There should be a five minute rule -- If a technology glitch occurs for a reluctant user, they should be able to rely on help to show them how to correct the problem within five minutes.2 How is this paid for? It's time for administrators to also think in a new paradigm. Remember, technology allows for teachers to both procure and produce their own materials, so reliance on standard text and some printed materials could be greatly reduced.
Design and Scheduling Needs:
School administrations and staff must step outside of their current scheduling methods and devise one that allows for peer mentoring. Daily scheduling needs to let strong users of technology assist reluctant users without adding to their workload. A nearby and responsive source of help can ultimately convince reluctant users that they can learn technical skills on their own.
As new technological skills are introduced, it is important to emphasize their strategic place within the recognized content standards. Performance on the state's assessment program is an important driving force for school administrations. All content areas of workshops and peer mentoring should be able to show the ways in which teacher participation will lend itself to improved assessment scores for students. Fortunately, technology is ideally suited to using content standards to drive the development of lesson materials and software.
It Can be Done!
Today's technology provides vast new opportunities where students and teachers alike become co-learners within a new educational paradigm. The potential is there for all of us to become educational producers and collaborators, learning to share ever more sophisticated information and programs with each other. It can free teachers and students from traditional constraints of outdated textbooks, inadequate library resources and the isolation of individual classrooms and remote locations. Teachers can now center their curriculum around current issues and events available on the web and even use it as a delivery tool for their own materials. Students learning and working within this new environment can be better prepared to contribute within this new paradigm for tomorrow's workplace.
1. Guy Kawasaki from "Rules for Revolutionaries," Harper Collins Pub. 1999
2 Jaimieson McKenzie,Ed.D., www.fromnowon.org staff development articles
Now that computers are making their way into large numbers of classrooms, schools are beginning to realize that the window of opportunity in which to use them while they are still current is a narrow one. There is justified concern that the large investments in technology may be seen as too extravagant if it is not utilized to its potential. All too often, implementation of computer technology has been haphazard, lacking an organized program to help teachers fully utilize the power of the computer that they finally have before them. Many schools have made a push to get everyone using a grading program and perhaps have offered get started sessions for word processing, PowerPoint and similar applications, but this leaves most of what technology has to offer untapped. In fact, studies suggest that from 10% - 25% of a district's technology expenditure should be used for staff development. Alarmingly, many schools have allocated very little funding to training and coaching staff in educational technology methods. |
