Has Technology Fulfilled Your Promise in the Classroom?

I'm sure all of us have experienced something like that scenario with a teacher-staring out at a collage of blank faces, hoping for a student to show some interest, some spark of understanding, or should we dare even think of it as some insight.

As this teacher used old-fashioned “talk and chalk” at the front of his classroom, his students drifted farther and farther away. No wonder he wanted to take a day off and a self-declared holiday. We all laugh at this scene, but we need to ask ourselves: What are we doing so differently now? It seems that our “technologically advanced” classrooms aren't much different from this teacher's boring class.

We have “integrated” technology into our classrooms by simply tacking it on. We now have students take online quizzes at starquiz.com like the one I used before, assign them slide presentations rather than paper-based reports. We use PowerPoint slides to present our lectures, instead of chalk and blackboards and or markers and whiteboard. So how does that make us much different than the above-mentioned teacher?

We unthinkingly automated our tasks, and our students followed our lead. When assigned a research project, they quickly find Web pages on the Internet, cut and paste information onto their slides, and then spend the remainder of class time playing with colors and animations. They are no more engaged with the curricular topic than they were before the computers arrived, perhaps even less so. So what do we do? We need to start asking ourselves more challenging questions when it comes to the implementation of instructional technology not just “So how do I use this?”