I am collaborating with the Alabama Best Practice Centre. Its a really interesting experience and one I am enjoying and getting benefit from.
One of the teachers asked me this question….
“Andrew,
What do you think is the best way to encourage teachers who may be reluctant to begin integrating technology into their lessons?”
This is something many of us face everyday.
There are a couple of things I would suggest. The process we use is a little of the carrot and a little of the stick.
The stick is obvious, we have stated that ICT must be integrated into the curriculum. We are after all a laptop school and our parents would rightly complain if we did not have a high level of integration.
The carrot is that the integration should make the teachers life easier. It can do this in a number of ways.
1. It captivates and motivates the students, this in turn makes the teachers life easier as they are not having as many behavioural issues to deal with. Better motivated students make for much more enjoyable classes. You only have to look at the work Gary Stager has done with troubled kids in his lego based constructionist classroom to see how it works.
2. It improves the quality of the students work. On a superficial level, it looks pretty and the text is easier to read, but this is really superficial. I get my students to use a tool called readplease, for the drafting process of essays. We have all experienced work handed into us that is almost illiterate because students have read it. So my students get their essays, drop them into readplease and then the software reads it back to them. The quality of the essays is vastly improved and what I receive is greatly improved. Click here to see a video on this I posted to teachertube
3. It adds variety - Again this is a motivation element as well as appealing to different learning styles. Capture the students learning style and watch the changes. It also makes the teaching experience more enjoyable for the teacher.
4. It appeals to a variety of different learning styles. I, personally, am an advocate of VARK - Visual, Auditory, Read/write & Kinesthetic. I present these at conferences regularly. Use the preferred learning style and watch the improvements.
5. Our students are wired differently to us. They have always been exposed to high speed media, instant connection, immediate response etc. These continuous experiences have conditioned/wired/programmed their brains to respond differently to our own. They do think differently - I would recommend you give them Prensky’s two papers -Digital natives Digital Immigrants 1 & 2
and then get them to look at Ian Jukes work and Also some recent work out of Harvard on Neo-Millennial learning styles
6. I would encourage them with labour saving tools and improved workflow - Self marking tests using tools like Moodle, hot potatoes or eXe. Instant surveys using tools like surveymonkey etc.
7. Encourage them to communicate - Show them blogs and how the kids can use these as journals, Show them the considered and structured replies, the learning taking place led by the students, the ownership they take of this and their learning.
8. reward innovators - give them PD, send them to conferences
9. Be sneaky - make them use ICT in sneaky ways. Post the daily notices online rather thanin paper form, its environmentally friendly and means that the teachers must use their computers. Get all your proforma and forms in template form of the computers for the same reason.
10. Get a photocopier that scans and email, Don’t photocopy and hand out, scan and email!
