Is Technology Integration a fad in schools ?

Dear Friends,

It has been quite a long time since i put a post on my blog. The last three months gave me lot of insight into integrating technology into education, primarily into teaching-learning. My experiences during the past few months have reiterated the fact further that there's still a lot that needs to be done to bring teachers to the computer labs. The first step towards bringing computers in classroom is to bring teachers to computer lab. Computers is still a phobia, even for those who have underwent some training on computers/ technology integration. As long as we do not put teachers in the loop of the technology integration process, we cannot hope to achieve anything. I am highlighting just few of my thoughts ( triggered by my experiences) that have been haunting me for want of a proper solution. Since I firmly believes in being more solution-oriented, so I will put in my suggestions to each of the listed thoughts.

• The highly reputed schools have the most technology phobic teachers as they have been accustomed or trained to be dependent on the readymade products and restricted only to use it. This happens mainly due to availability of large amount of funds.
• You can manage to bring teachers to computer lab/ computers through force but you cannot make them use technology. The rule of thumb for learning anything new is to try it out, to do it.
• The extrinsic motivation is of no avail as long as there's no intrinsic motivation in the teacher.
• The teachers need to realise that technology could only act as a catalyst towards achieving/ bringing technology integration in education, the real integration of technology would happen only when teachers actually start using it for fulfilling their needs.
• The school management plays a deciding role in facilitating or bottlenecking the technology integration process. Merely providing computers or readymade content, LMS cannot bring in the technology integration. The more the number of ready made tools introduced by the management, the more the teachers get dependent on them and the more techno-phobic they get. Unless, you ask the teachers to actually create or experiment, they just cannot adopt technology.
• The teachers need to have an internet identity and the least they could do for that is to create an email id of their own. Let checking email daily become a routine for them.
• The teachers really need to understand the purpose of every technology tool offered/ provided to them. Even a simple email id could go a long way in helping them get started with technology facilitated teaching-learning.
• The teachers need not get bogged down with the hype surrounding internet, etc. Everyday there would be some terms coined and floated in the market. The teachers just need to remember this that all that these new educational tools would require/ expect from the teacher would be a willingness to try, innovate and experiment. None of the new technologies that crop up every now and then for educators require any extra degree of knowledge apart from being basic computer literate and having an internet identity.
  

I have just highlighted some of my experiences and would be touching upon few of them in more detail in my next blogs.

Lets not breed the teachers on cooked content but help them understand technology and facilitate their journey to e-teaching