What's My Why?

Why

The wide-spread availability of technology in the classroom needs to be paired with the proper training, understanding, and knowledge on how to keep learning first.

How

To do this, we need to support our teachers to find their own choice and ownership over how they use the technology with their students in a way that learning remains the priority.

What

Prepare our teachers to utilize all resources available to them to educate our students in a way that will prepare them for the world they are in, the world, they are entering into, and the world that does not yet exist.

My experience with technology in the classroom came long before I was a teacher myself. I graduated high school in 2000 and after becoming pregnant shortly after, I was unable to move to a larger town to attend college. I needed to stay where I was for the job I had and the support system. Thankfully, online education was just becoming available in the area where I lived. I enrolled at our local 2-year community college in town and after the first year, I was able to attend the rest of my college classes online. I obtained my Associate's Degree and because of online education, I was able to continue my college education. I went on over the next ten years and obtained a Bachelor's Degree and two Master's Degrees. I am now enrolled again after about an eight year break to work on yet another degree. Without online education, I would not have had the opportunities available to me today.

However, with that, there were some struggles along the way. First, online education was not seen as a legitimate way of obtaining a degree by many people. I was having to often defend my college education and show that not only was it legit, but it was often harder and took more time than a traditional college environment. As time went on, online education became more and more accepted. Another struggle that I saw as an online college student was that some colleges and instructors did not fully understand how to properly go online. One college experience in general comes to mind. I was working on my first Master's Degree and decided to try a university closer to home and it was just my luck that their first ever, fully online, Master's Degree was in the field I wanted to be in. I was excited to be able to be a part of a "local" college and still be an online student. However, after only 2 semesters in that program, I transferred to another university. The main problem was that as a student, it did not appear that the university and the professors knew what it took to go online. It is not simply putting all of the material online and checking your emails to answer questions. There is training that a professor needs to go through to understand the differences in teaching online vs. in person. There are also things that the university needs to do in order to make their program possible for online delivery. One example was that the technology support was only available for limited hours each week, and not even for the whole time of normal business. There wasn't a policy on how long professors had to respond to emails and the professors were not participating in discussions or giving feedback. The information was put on the site and as a student it felt as though they never really checked it again unless they were putting a grade on it. This experience as a student drives my outlook now as a teacher.

When I became a teacher in 2013, I saw technology becoming available to our students in our area. One small school district had purchased iPads for their entire student population but then three years later the superintendent was upset because they were being used mainly for kids to play games or not at all. Coming into that district at that time, I realized it was because the district never spent the time to train the teachers on how to use that technology. You can't just give iPads to all the students and not help guide the teachers on how to implement them in the classroom. Currently, I am a District Technology Integration Specialist in a different district. We provided all of our students with Chromebooks two years ago. When my district did this, they created my current position and moved me into it. They saw the need for guidance and support for our teachers with this change. Helping teachers look at the learning goal, instead of the technology tool, is what I focus on doing often. If we can always keep the priority as learning, and not technology, then our teachers will continue to learn the best way to utilize the new technology in the classroom and our students will learn how to use it in a way that supports their learning.