I would use technology more if…
And interesting comment at the Spiral Notebook blog entry I would use technology more if…:
I use and have used technology in my classrooms since 1991, the first day I became a teacher. But the longer I teach, the more I see tech support and adminstration restricting the use of technology in education. School districts shouldn’t be in the business of buying hardware and software anyway. My thinking is that teachers should bring their own technology to school and be paid to do so. That way tech support can’t prevent teachers from exploring software apps which aren’t on the “approved” list. It would be a win-win in that tech support can merely provide connectivity and not have to be concerned about my hardware-software. They don’t directly pay for my car or change its oil, after all.
I don’t understand when this would ever work. A lot of teachers haven’t even been taught what the computer can do, and when someone doesn’t know what the tool can do, they don’t know what questions to ask. In the above comment, if it came to fruition, you would have the teachers that already feel proficient wanting to purchase equipment but can’t afford it while other students with other teachers that don’t see the need getting behind. In our district even if you took the entire technology budget and put that on teacher salaries, it would be worth about $867.
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It looks like the teacher is just upset that they can’t install some application that they want to use. Ultimately, the tech department is responsible for making sure everything works together, and for fixing and supporting the hardware, software, and infrastructure. I can’t imagine doing that with each teacher making his or her own hardware and software decisions. Just dealing with word processing file formats would be enough to make me tear my hair out.
I think teachers (and some administrators) buy into the hype too much. They go to some conference, or see some advertisement, and are totally sold on the application du jour. That’s why we end up with things like Boardmaker (glorified clipart), Inspiration (for those who can’t find the drawing toolbar in Word), and Kurzweil and Write OutLoud (for those who don’t realize that the Mac has been able to read text to them since 1984).
Tech support people do geeky things like reading EULAs. When they see things like Skype saying, “oh, yeah, and we can basically do anything we want to your machine and your network,” they tend to think twice about how critical the new application is.
Since we don’t always explain our reasons, the teachers can get frustrated.