I enjoyed gathering data to use for the school evaluation summary. The process gave me the opportunity to talk with our building tech coordinators and with teachers about how they use technology in their curriculum.
Our school has a lot of the infrastructure and hardware required to have a possible classification in the Integrated or Intelligent categories. But there is little school or district wide consensus on grade level appropriate technology objectives. This gives teachers little guidance on what they should be doing with the technology available to them, and what they can expect their students to already know how to do. The result is a scattered approach to introducing technology into the curriculum, with most teachers working alone at the task.
One factor about the school’s demographics that may contribute to this lack of technology integration is the experience level of the teachers. In our school’s accreditation information, where I looked to get information on the school’s demographics, the high experience level of the teachers was played up as being a benefit to the school environment. And I agree that experienced teachers are incredible valuable in schools. But being experienced can go hand in hand with having less experience with new technology. Especially since I found that our district has no systematic, formal technology training process. Teachers who do not seek out training, whether formal or informal, will most likely feel less comfortable with new technology, and with implementing tech use in their classrooms. This is where I made my final recommendation in the technology evaluation; that the school could significantly increase its technology rating by giving more formal training, or setting up collaboration that focusses on technology use.
This artifact meets the AECT standard #4: Management in the fact that it required me to analyze how technology was being used and to identify ways to plan for the future. The project also relates to standard #5: Evaluation in the sense that I had to collect data and interpret it to evaluate my school’s technology maturity.
Technology Maturity Model Benchmarks Survey and Evaluation:
lindsaydurningdavis 