Educator Preparation in Technology

Of the 4 areas in the long-range plan for technology and the STaR Chart, I chose to talk about the area of educator preparation. The reason is because, on a broader spectrum, this is the one area that is either not making much progress or the people taking the survey do not feel like it is. The vision and goals of this area aim for the teachers and other educators to reach an acceptable level of preparedness to teach and incorporate their subject matter with technology. Several of my other readings over the last couple of weeks have really focused on how the older generations are not familiar with technology and can be very resistant to changing education to embrace the use of it. The plan aims to have teachers graduate from educator preparation programs and exit them with a greater knowledge of how to incorporate technology into their classrooms. Knowing how, obviously, does not cut it though. The greater goal is not only to educate them, but to have them integrate that technology into their classes and across all curriculum.

On my particular campus, our progress in this area has actually been quite good. 3 years ago we scored only 50% of the total possible points, and are now at 75%, moving from developing tech status to advanced tech. This is in contrast to the statewide progress though. During the 3 year period for the whole state, the early tech and developing tech status numbers increased while the advanced and target tech statuses decreased significantly. This means that more teachers on more campuses are seeing themselves as less prepared for technology usage in their schools. The national consensus seems to be the same as well with 55% of teachers feeling only average in regards to their knowledge of technology usage.

The trends seem to point towards a regression in this area as a state and perhaps nationally. As far as my particular campus goes, we are improving or at least the teachers feel like they are more prepared. Hopefully these trends continue for my school. However, in order to ensure that these increases in confidence continue, I would recommend that the skills specialists and administration on campus provide opportunities and resources for incorporating technology in the classrooms. The lack of funding and current technology are definitely the greatest deficit on our campus. Statewide and nationally I think we are going to need the same things. Increased funding is going to be necessary for initial educator preparation programs as well as providing them with the technology in their classrooms so they can both incorporate it into their lessons as well as experiment with it and both become familiar with it and see how it can best be used to benefit their students.