Many teachers and principals have said repeatedly to the point of the words being cliched: “integrating technology is not about technology, it is about learning.” Yet those who buy and deploy new technologies continue to seek “educational uses” for the electronic devices.
Buy the technology you need not educational technology
The instructional focus shifts from being teacher-centered to being learner-centered…. Traditional verbal activities are gradually replaced by authentic hands-on-inquiry related to a problem….”
Why, she asks, should K-12 teachers’ roles change to integrate technology effectively?
These two reasons, technocentrism and pedagogical dogmatism, Harris argues, explain why for decades, enthusiastic policymakers, researchers, and practitioners have confused technology integration (involving the perennial conflict of content vs. skills) with technology as an instrument for pedagogical reform (moving from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction).
Since most technology designers do not understand effective teaching (or are not designing something for teaching purposes), they often focus on making content more appealing or easier to access instead of creating a technology that causes students to more deeply engage mentally with content.
When I did my doctoral research, I found that just bringing in technology and showing teachers how it worked did not change pedagogy. I believe that if you want to change pedagogy to a more constructivist approach, you need to tackle this head on and not make it part of some technology project.
I worked for a compay that sold Pnnicle Analytics and the stuff you can learn from data mining is awesome. Especially when they make an intuitive interface.
I can see how collecting data on teachers is a problem until we answer the question of how do we evaluate quality teachers. What if someone points to a implementation dip and uses that as grounds for termination?
use their data to
help struggling teachers and to reward successful ones
While it's useful to
have that kind of longitudinal data [for policy purposes]," he says,
"one should not impute conclusions about the true depth of a child's
intellectual development in terms of math, science, or whatever."
results on statewide tests
aren't as useful as many policymakers think.
Students take the tests
at the start of every quarter in every subject, and the results are
available the same day. The data are broken down by the racial, ethnic,
economic, and other subgroups used in NCLB accountability reports.
For example, when students lack social and emotional connections to learning, educators, schools, and their peers, it often leads to behavior issues or disengagement, which inevitability leads to declining achievement and, in the worst cases, students dropping out of high schoo
Researchers generally agree that learning is inherently social-it happens in the context of interactions and relationships with teachers, peers, family, experts, and others
They find kindred spirits who fuel joint explorations and productions, reinforce understandings, and provide divergent opinions and clarification of understandings as discussions ensue. In many cases, social interactions enable levels of learning that simply wouldn’t be possible for students to accomplish on their own.