Discussion 2 - Week 4 Articles

Examining Teacher Technology Use Article
I agree with most of the points made in this article. When I began my first teaching job, we were sent to a few teacher professional development sessions on using technology. However, these sessions were a training tool on how to use the software correctly or how to correctly make a product. The focus was not on how to use what we learned and integrate our training into a lesson. The article doesn't address the many things that schools have to train teachers about. Yes, we do need more technology training. For example during the past few years in Alabama, the Alabama Reading Initiative was introduced and every teacher in the state has had to go to several training sessions about teaching reading effectively. I think that schools are trying to do their best to educate teachers about technology, but it is difficult juggling professional development time. I do wish that teachers could use technology more effectively. Last year, one teacher that I co-taught with "branched out" and let students type their own poems in Microsoft Word. Would the authors of this article see this as a use of technology? This was an older teacher, a digital immigrant, and she thought that doing this was a great use of technology. I agree to a point, but with the things that we are able to do with computers these days, a word document seemed rather dim in comparison. As I said, it is a difficult juggling act, and teachers are feeling the pressure to perform and use things that they are not comfortable with to meet the demands from school systems.

High Access and Low Use of Technologies Article
The first thing that struck me about this article is the teacher describing the students using the internet to conduct research for projects. This was interesting to me because most of the classes that I have taught with had the children use books exclusively to conduct research. It was almost as if they expected the children to already know how to conduct research using the internet. The yearly standardized tests also assessed the student's knowledge of research skills using books intended for research (atlas, thesaurus, encyclopedia, almanac). Even though using computer skills is more practical and probably more realistic, that is not what they are tested on, so that skill isn't focused. However, this article is about high school, where I have no experience whatsoever! But most of the reasons that teachers didn't use the technology still seem to resonate today, even in elementary school and even though the article is a little old. I do agree that we need to teach and use technology in a way that is focused on doing more than word processing. As I mentioned before, some schools seem to be teaching non-computer skills. A majority of the students are probably able to look up a topic using Google, but hand them a book to use a table of context or index and they are thrown for a loop. What are those things anyway? But does that matter, since things like magazines, newspapers, and books are slowly becoming obsolete? What do we teach and what do we use? Who gets to say? Again, I think there is more to teaching with technology than looking up something on Google and then typing a report. I also had my math teacher friend say that using a basic PowerPoint is just an overhead slide on the computer. I can't argue with that. Should that count as teaching with technology? Teachers need training to deal with these issues, and there does not seem to be enough time or money.