Chapter 7 Notes

What Should Teachers Know About Technology and Its Impact on Schools?

The use of technology in the classroom has gained attention as an issue in education. As our society continues to embrace new forms of communication, networking, and computer technologies, our schools are scrambling to keep up.

As this example demonstrates, teachers are not being replaced by computers. In fact, teachers have an expanded role in this technologically enriched environment, through this role differs from the traditional one associated with teaching.

A Brief look at education’s technological past

Today people usually equate educational technology with computers. But technology in a more general sense is by no means new to education.

In the early 1800s, a technological innovation was introduced to classrooms and had a profound impact on teaching. Schools had to encourage use of this new technology by preparing training manuals with step-by-step instructions to help teachers integrate the device into their lessons.

What was this technological wonder? The chalkboard!

In the old one-room school houses, where students of different ages worked on their own individual lessons, the function of a chalkboard was not immediately apparent. During the nineteenth century, orientation to the graded classrooms we know today.

Similarly, in the 1980s, when microcomputers became affordable, many software products were introduced to drill students on basic skills, and some educational visionaries predicted the end of classroom instruction and the end of the teaching profession as we know it. Of course, this forecast turned out-to-be no more correct than Edison’s overstatement.

Once a technology enters the classroom, the uses to which it is put are affected by what we might call the technology’s level of maturity. In education as in other fields, new technologies tend to go through three stages of application: 1 in the first stage, the technology is applied to things we already do. 2 in the second stage, the technology is used to improve upon existing tasks. 3 in the third stage of maturity, the technology are used to do things that were not possible in the past.

How are schools being pressured to change?

No wonder, then, that schools are feeling pressure to increase their use of technological tools. This pressure is coming from many sources: 1 parent is placing pressure on schools to use technologies in the classroom. 2 students are placing pressure on schools by knowing more about which technologies are currently available and how to use them than do many of the teachers. 3 teachers are placing pressure on schools because they need both accesses to technology effectively. 4 businesses are placing pressure on schools and governmental agencies to adequately prepare future employees. 5 the perception that the United States is falling behind the world in educational attainment has increased the pressure on schools and teachers to bridge this gap. 6 governmental agencies have moved to support federal, state, and local initiatives to ensure access to technology for K-12 students.