The event that I am choosing to write about is a physics software/hardware package that the science department at a previous school purchased for me approximately 12 years ago. A sales representative for an educational supply company came to the school and did a presentation on the package for myself and a few of the other science teachers. The package included a number of gadgets and graphing software that were supposed to be interactive and give the student immediate feedback on how the graph related to the motion of an object. The package cost between $1000 and $1200 and I was the only physics teacher in the school at the time.
I chose this experience because the package never got used – not once. In retrospect, I believe it was purchased for the following reasons:
- We were already under pressure to “use technology” more in the classroom
- The science department head loved gadgets
- The sales representative did an excellent job in presenting the package
The package was never used for the following reasons:
- There were no instructions on how to load it on to a computer and it could only work on one computer at a time
- There were no instructions on how to hook up the various devices and get them interacting with the software
- Although a lab activity book was promised with the software, it never came in spite of repeated requests for it
- I was the only teacher that it would have been useful to and I had no knowledge (at the time) of how to make it work or what I could do with it once it was working. I had no time allotted to figure it out and so little experience with that kind of technology that I didn’t know where to begin. I tried to get it working a couple of times but was unsuccessful. I didn’t have the time, motivation or interest to persevere with the new technology.
$1000 – $1200 worth of technology sat on a shelf and was never used. Every time I looked at it I felt guilty and incompetent, so I moved it out of view and eventually it became obsolete and disappeared.
This experience is a critical event in my history because it was a motivating factor in the start of my journey to incorporate technology into my classroom. It bothered me that it had never been used and I wanted to used technology but did not have the time or energy to figure out what worked and what did not on my own. The pursuit of that information led me to the MET program.
The experience (or lack of it) with the physics package also taught me a number of things. For example, having technology without the support or knowledge to implement it is useless, having someone who is keen on technology purchase it (without support) for someone who is not does not improve the situation, that money spent on technology without forethought and planning is often wasted. And that some sales reps are very good at their jobs.