Overcoming Inertia: Inhibitions and Anxiety of Using Technology in the Classroom (Part 3)

The more I read these 'excuses' to why teachers can't use technology, the more similar these excuses are to why students don't always do their homework. The more excuses these teachers try to find to not implement technology, the more they sound like students.

I believe that just trying something new is half the battle. Often enough, trying gets you very far in learning programs. I am astonished at how many people still don't know how to use programs like PowerPoint or Excel. They are time-saving tools that need to be implemented and taught in the classroom.

I was once hired by the State dept of Education to manage one County's part of a statewide effort to bring some technology proficiency into the classroom.

The program was already in the last year of a five year state funding when I was brought in.

It's important to recognize that I am not an educator in the traditional sense. While I have designed and conducted hundreds of classes for engineers and architects, that was a completely different environment from your generic public or private grade and high school.

I was hired by on the strength of my success in providing training programs for many firms on Wall Street. The programs covered the gamut from Word processing to spread sheets and then some.

Once in the school I spent the first week traveling throughout the county talking to school administrators and teachers to see what was wanted and needed.

It soon became apparent that the program had stagnated and was viewed by the teachers in the County with a stifled yawn.

The reason for the failure to attract teachers was rooted in the fact that whomever had designed the programs had modeled them after a common paradigm: students take a course. They complete the course and then move on to the next course. A fresh body of students moves in, takes the same course and then they too move on, in a continuous cycle that is familiar to all, I am sure.

Such repetitive iterations of the same subject might work in a classroom where an never ending stream of new students can be counted on next semester.

However, to impliment the same menu of computer courses twice a year for four years in a county with less than 300 teachers was wrong. It should have come as no surprise to anyone when teachers refused to take the classes again, in spite of the incentives. It was simply boring!

What complicated matters further was that different teachers in different schools have different after school responsibilities which start and end at different times. Scheduling classes for a County wide population with diverse scheduling requirements was a frustrating balancing act. Asking teachers to drive to another school to take the courses complicated things further.

Our state mandates that teachers be able to show 100(?) hours of continuing professional development over a five year period if they expect to keep their state certification as teachers and computer programs gave such credits. Still we could not attract the teaching population.

I completely revamped the computer curriculum's, pulled back on the MS Office products that had dominated the schedule and grabbed at anything that looked different. The programs were designed from the onset to be fun!

Whereas 2D drafting with AutoCAD had dominated the CAD environment, I brought in Solidworks and Pro Engineer and had the teachers using it.

The nurses in the school who are rarely if ever included in these activities found themselves with an opportunity to learn how to use software specific to keeping and transferring student health records, from their school to the next, an activity involving sensitive information and ripe for law suits if not done correctly.

Gym teachers played with programs that facilitated exercise regimens and calculated calorie burns. Power point became a teaching instrument for football players to learn complex plays on the field.

The theater group joined with other CAD students and used Solidworks to model the school theater and auditorium and plan in advance how sets occupied space and how they were seen from different seats in the theater.

Science teachers found Solidworks useful for everything from demonstrating mass properties to observing complex dynamic kinematic devices. Showing FEA programs and animated stress models with gradient colors added a dramatic Wow! factor to teachers and students alike. Solid modeling and FEA in high school? Yes!

Students in an advanced microbiology class learned how to make 3D models of chemical components and then assembled them in a DNA helix, an exercise that had everyone giggling it was so much fun.

Another thing I learned was to schedule classes for teachers separately from administrators. Some people need to look good in front of others. Some are fearful of looking bad. Keeping teachers in one class and administrators in another made for a much more relaxed tone. Administrators who wouldn't be caught dead raising their hands in front teachers, became quite engaged when in a room populated only with other administrators.

Some teachers were also intimidated by the simple fact that many of their students were dramatically more advanced than they and carefully avoided the use of the PC's in the classrooms for this reason. These individuals often had to be coached in private. Not sure how to deal with that.

When the grant program funding my activities ended, I was disappointed and so were the many schools who supported the program.

I have always enjoyed learning and continue to bring that passion to all my activities which are predominantly mechanical design. This opportunity to help develop a learning environment for teachers was an anomaly and completely inconsistent with my normal activities. That made it all the more exciting for me.

As with all things human, the omnipresent "investment factor" will keep the older generation teachers stuck. Until they see that the rewards for giving up their comfort level is far greater than staying stuck.

Unfortunately, their exists in far too many systems an adversarial environment being unions and administration and I often found that the biggest challenge was negotiating the land mines without stepping on one. When the job was over, I didn't miss that for one minute.

If I were asked to identify the single biggest problem affecting teachers and their ability use computers, I would look first at the climate in which they work and eliminate those factors that drain their psyche and love of teaching. With that out of the way, helping them to use computers in the classroom will be a no-brainer and their own passion for learning rejuvenated!

I attribute this success to a number if factors. I suspect however, that aside from my own native enthusiasm was that I was the "odd man" in the school and brought a new perspective. I saw things that others could have seen had they not been part of the conventional educational paradigm.

L. J.

Holy cow. What a well developed and insightful comment. Thanks for taking the time.