National Technology Standards

I believe that when it comes to technology and the implementation of it into the classroom, it is difficult to incorporate all of the different national standards for technology into the lessons. After looking through the different standards for both students and teachers, I have learned that a lot of the standards go hand in hand. It is the teacher’s job to accept responsibility for the standards and therefore promote student curiosity, innovation, communication, collaboration, research and information fluency, critical thinking, problem solving,  decision-making, digital citizenship, and the understanding of technology operations and concepts. I believe that as teachers of all different areas and from all different backgrounds, it is difficult for us to all be on the same page. Teachers who have been teaching for years, do not like how technology has taken over their classroom instruction, and they strongly believe in doing as they have been for numerous years. As far as I go, as a fairly new classroom teacher, I believe that technology is an amazing opportunity for students to demonstrate their learning. I strongly believe in all of the different standards for students and teachers and I believe that students can learn so much from technology that most people wouldn’t even realize. I have participated in numerous professional development opportunities both in my school districts and outside of school to learn more about technology, and one of my biggest concerns about technology is that I go and get trained to use these technology programs or different activities, and I go back to school so excited to implement them some way into my classroom instruction, but then I do not have the resources to do so. We have a computer lab at our school, but our school is Pre-K to 8, so there are a lot of different classes that need to schedule computer lab time. Something that would be so wonderful would be to be able to use a smart board for most of my lessons. When we go to the computer lab, my students are hands on with the smart board and they enjoy learning. The only pieces of technology that I have in my classroom are 4 computers, an overhead projector, and a tape player. We do have portable laptop carts which we can sign out and use whenever we want, but there are again, restrictions on those, due to other class uses.

            Some questions about the standards that I have are How can a school district with limited materials be able to implement technology to the extent represented by the standards? How do we get those teachers who are stuck in their own ways of teaching from the past 20+ years, to take a risk and try out technology and what it has to offer?