Reflections on Technology Facilitator Standard II: Planning and Designing Learning Environments and Experiences

Standard II, planning and designing learning environments and experiences, was closely aligned with Standard I which enabled me to combine the standards into at least one of my field based projects. Before starting my classes, covering the standards, and gaining more insight I had a difficult time sympathizing with teachers about them not using the technology that was placed in their classroom. The district or school would spend an immense amount of money and I would take a great deal of time installing hardware and software for the classrooms, and the teachers would rarely use the equipment or software. Previously I had assumed it was simply because they either didn’t care or didn’t want to use the software, but I came to realize that the majority of the time it is simply that they don’t know how to effectively use the tools to enhance the students education, this is where I found Standard II to fit in wonderfully. Understanding this had a great impact on me when I created the professional development class for teachers in EDLD 5333, ensuring that I included not only information on how to enrich the students education, but how to use the technology currently in their classroom to produce positive results. Using the technologies that are in the classroom to enrich the student’s education is something that is vitally important, and becoming more important with dwindling budgets. Because of this, Standard II is something that I feel I will be referring to on a regular basis the entire time I am working in the educational system.

The primary strategy that I used when implementing this standard was to ensure that teachers were able and trained on using the technology that they currently have in their classroom. This is especially important with this standard when dealing with the technology at the high school level for me since there is an immense amount of technology already in place. Using currently installed and implemented technologies is very important to schools in that it enables them to fully utilize their investment in technologies that are already in place without purchasing and implementing new, and possibly unused tools. Covering this standard really made me take a critical look at the tools that have been installed over the past three or four years and understand that there are ways to use these tools in new and powerful ways as long as the teachers know how to use them. My interactions with my colleagues when going over this standard were primarily based in speaking with the classroom teachers and finding out that the teachers really wanted to know how to use the technologies in their classrooms to help the students, but they did not have the time and resources to research how to use these tools.

When looking at this standard as a lifetime learner I realize that there is much to be done, and will always have to be done to help teachers understand and be able to fully utilize current technologies in their classrooms. As I have stated before with dwindling budgets it is even more important to fully use tools that are already in place, in addition to that schools and districts have to ensure that future technologies that they purchase will be used by the teachers and students, thus making training and research extraordinarily important. My experiences when working through this project will resonate within me when evaluating new technologies for the schools and district and will be one of the major deciding factors when making suggestions about these technologies to other district administrators and school principals. Research and understanding will, and must, be key when making important decisions about future educational technology; this includes not only hardware and software support, but faculty support as well including training and ongoing support for these tools because putting technology in a classroom does no good if the teachers don’t know how to use it.