Sean H

How to Sell Education Technology to Even the Most Technophobic Teachers

Dear Technology Integrator:

Most modern teachers already use digital technology – yes, even the most technophobic ones:

  • They email
  • They surf the web for resources
  • They use text messaging
  • They create worksheets on a word processor
  • They create spreadsheets for marks
  • They’re probably on FaceBook

 

The problem is that they refuse to let their students do the same thing in the classroom. Students in these classrooms use paper copies and produce paper-based work and assessments.

All the tech revolution in education is after is to allow students to use these same technologies in their learning. It isn’t about apps. It isn’t about tablets. It is about online research, using social media for learning and to generate engagement, using digital tools to prove their mastery and communicating with one another and the teacher.

That’s it really. Any teacher can become a techy teacher overnight simply by allowing their students to use the same technology in the classroom as the teacher does in private.

All the rest follows.

That’s the logic of it. I’ll leave the spin up to you.

Regards

Sean

3 comments

  1. Hey Sean! Reading this post just gave me a whole new perspective on part of one of the courses, and I felt the need to share it. In my TV production classes, we produce videos and often watch them in class and play the best ones on the school TV news. In addition, I often encourage students to post their videos to YouTube, but never fully integrate into the course. Only a few students ever actually do it. But taking this idea of allowing students just to do equal technology work to what we do in our own lives just changed that for me. I use YouTube to upload video tutorials and I use social media to promote blog posts and interact with other educators and content creators. So, shouldn’t I be doing the same in class? And in a production team of four students, we are bound to have at least one student willing to use their channel to host the project, and many social media accounts to promote their films. We will tie it all together with a hashtag! I want to try this out with our next project. Thanks for the spark.

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