I interviewed, a first year teacher in Grade Two French Immersion at a K-6 dual track (French Immersion and English) school. The school was built in the late 1980s and many of the school supplies in the math and science rooms have been there since the school opened. The school has very low staff turn over and most teachers have been on staff for nine or more years. I also chatted with some veteran teachers although I didn’t formally interview them due to it being report card season. I found the issues raised during our interview were the same issues I heard from veteran teachers.
This teacher completed her bachelor of education last year and as a part of which she did her internship (a 12-week placement) at this school, and she was able to return on a temporary contract this year. The teacher stated that she is a new teacher and feels she still has a lot to learn in terms of mastering her curriculum, the pedagogical approaches, meeting the needs of her students, and managing the day-to-day operations of a classroom. As I spoke with her, she was setting aside report cards to spend a few minutes talking with me. She is a classroom generalist with 21 students in her classroom and teaches all curricular areas except for music, which serves as her non-instruction (prep) period.
She stated that she doesn’t use technology that much in math. Mostly it serves to play youtube videos to demonstrate a new skill. In addition to this, applications are used on one of the classroom’s four dedicated iPads to practice addition and subtraction for reinforcement.
For science she stated that she uses technology for videos to reinforce what has been taught in the classroom. Software included Notebook, the software used together with the interactive whiteboards in the school. On the interactive white board, she uses digital tools to replace physical tools that exist in the school but, due to age, have become unreliable. For example, the thermometers she uses in support of a unit on temperature no longer reliably give the temperature. As such, she uses digital thermometers and asks students to interact with them via the interactive white board. She states that it helps students to visually see how the thermometers work and to interact with them. She made a point of stating that the children were the ones interacting with the tools and it was not used entirely by the teacher as a demonstration tool.
These interactive SMART boards are now becoming quite dated. This school was a pilot school when SMART technology was new and an interactive board was installed in every classroom. As this school was on the forefront of implementing this technology, many of the devices were installed in a way that didn’t make sense in light of teacher learning related to this technology later. For example, the board was installed in the furthest corner from internet access and the computers that control the boards live in the corner away from the board. As a plus, this forces teachers to use the boards as they were intended. As an unintended consequence, as the boards age they are increasingly difficult to interact with and often require the teacher to run to the corner of the room in order to navigate what is displayed on the board. Projectors are installed in the middle of the room with a black tube projecting out of the ceiling and as they age the connections are becoming loose, meaning that the projectors slowly sink and have to be re-centered for each use. This is relatively easy, but still a consideration in a classroom full of young learners who are often impatient for the lesson to continue. She joked that technology can be a fantastic tool for learning when it works, stating that as the tools age they become less reliable. In addition, she states that she often creates Power Point presentations for the students to introduce concepts.
She stated that she has only been a classroom teacher for five months, she has not been all the way through the curriculum at this point but anticipated technology allowing students to access information that they might not otherwise be able to access, when studying insects since they wouldn’t be able to have insects of birds in the classroom; while students wouldn’t interact themselves with the insects, they would be able to see others do so.
When asked about technology support at the school, she stated that there was lots of support and believed it to be adequate. She referred to a specialist teacher who was available to help with technical issues. Aside from this, she mentioned that if the specialist teacher was unable to resolve the issue then a work ticket had to be created and that sometimes it took an inordinate amount of time for the issue to be resolved. The Calgary Board of Education has recently moved to an IT support model in which schools are allowed a percentage of a full-time tech based on the number of students in the school. This is a reduction in time from previous years in which an IT specialist was assigned to 3-5 schools and attended to each school on a 5-6 day rotation. As IT time is reduced the load on classroom teachers is increased to solve day-to-day technical issues. She stated that she felt support for pedagogical integration of digital tools was inadequate and wondered if her feeling that it was inadequate was due to her still being new to the position.
She stated that university adequately prepared her for differentiated and multi-disciplinary learning, but that the university had provided inadequate training from a technical standpoint and from a pedagogical standpoint for the ability to plan for the integration of digital tools. She wished that the courses taken at university had dedicated some time to seeking digital resources. She felt that she had stumbled through a lot of aspects of integrating digital tools to this point. She did not, at this point, differentiate between technical aspects of technology integration and digital tools serving pedagogical purposes.
My reflection on the interview: the teacher comfortable with digital tools in the classroom but still uses them mainly in teacher-directed lessons and has yet to integrate the tools for students as a means of expressing their learning. As a new teacher, she is still learning so much about how to do her job that it is difficult to plan for the use of digital tools, too. In my reading, however, I was struck by Cuban et. al.’s writing that both veteran and new teachers experienced the same reluctance to take up digital tools in the classroom; lack of time, lack of training, and lack of support in navigating technical aspects feature in the feedback from both veteran and new teachers.
Cuban, L. Kirkpatrick, H. Peck, C. (2001). High Access and Low Use of Technologies in High School Classrooms. American Educational Research Journal.
Hi, Tracy!
Thanks for the interesting abstract of your interview! Personal opinion coming: I despise SmartBoards. I remember when they were all the rage and every school was itching to get them in the classroom. I also remember a school I student taught at (just 10 years ago!) brag about how they had the most SmartBoards of any school in the city. But, to be honest, in today’s day and age, they are outdated. My district just this year installed an interactive whiteboard in my classroom against my direct wishes and requests. Since it has been installed, it has only worked properly once. But, to me, that’s fine. I don’t need it. I can do WAY more with a simple iPad connected via AirPlay to the projector. Why mess with glitchy styluses that don’t even produce a clear line when I can use my Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro. I can add to the board from anywhere in the room, add in students to collaborate so they can all contribute, or simply let them take over the screen with AirPlay. That was my request to my district which was promptly turned down, as the Interactive Whiteboards “were already board approved.” So, we sojourn on.
But, I think Allie’s comment about technology and being updated is very insightful. Technology is quite different than buying furniture or books for the classroom library. They aren’t a one-time purchase. With as rapidly as things change, schools would do better to think about the flexibility of use that can be achieved over time with whatever they invest their money in. Also, as you pointed out, teachers need to be comfortable enough to use the technology so that they feel comfortable to turn it over to students. It’s when it gets into the hands of students that maximum impact can be reached.
To be honest, I quickly grow tired of the excuse from teachers about lack of training and support. Most answers to questions can be found through googling these days, or knowing who to ask. It takes a bit of proactivity to get solid answers at times, but they exist. I have been trying (with some success) on my campus to try and take this excuse away from my colleagues. I have made it well known that I LOVE to troubleshoot tech problems and that they are more than welcome to try something an then come to me when it doesn’t work. Even though I have no tech part in my title, I find myself going into other teacher’s classrooms 3 out of 5 days a week after school to troubleshoot their issues. As informal as this is, I’ve noticed the pattern that it is not usually the same teachers. Once a teacher takes the leap and sees that nothing terrible happens if a bump is encountered, they are bolder to continue trying in the future. And, consequently, they spread the word! Try and fail, but don’t fail to try! 😉
-Jonathan-
I agree with you, Jonathan. Personally, I think SMART boards are outdated and expensive. When they first came out we expected them to revolutionize education but most classrooms kept doing the same old things with new tools. Given the extremely tight budgets in schools, I think our dollars are better spent elsewhere.
I was fascinated reading your interview abstract. I think this interview captured a reality that many educators are facing day to day across the country regardless of their years of experience. Whether they are new teachers or veteran teachers I hear the same complaints, worries, and issues. The first and foremost is their own preparation for using technology in the classroom (either from teacher preparation courses or from professional development) followed technical problems and issues. I read an interesting article about TPACK and in it they describe this problem as being quite common. Teachers are described as having inadequate or inappropriate experiences with using digital technology for teaching and learning because they earned their degrees at a time when technology at a time when technology was at a very different stage than it is today (Koehler, Cain, & Mishra, 2013). Additionally in many teacher preparation programs technology is an optional 3 credit course, it is siloed and separate, much the way we approach it in many classrooms. What baffles me is how we will still end up with the divergent teachers. Those educators who take the time to try it, learn it, use it. Those teachers with the same degrees, the same support, and the same access to technology as everyone else. How does this happen?
I wonder about your Teacher Specialist you talked about. You mentioned that both the teacher specialist and the IT personnel both troubleshoot for the classroom teachers. What is the official role of the teacher specialist? Are they for troubleshooting or can they also coach, model, and offer support for classroom integration? Do you have curriculum/technology specialists that work at a district level that can be accessed? What PD opportunities or classroom support is available to educators?
Trish
Koehler, M.J., Cain, W., & Mishra, P. (2013). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK)?
You ask an interesting question about teacher support. The teacher specialist in our school is released 1-2h per six day cycle to deal with day-to-day management of our tools (making sure ipads are syncing, accounting for who is using the tools and ensuring they are taken care of, helping teachers plug in SMART boards and get them working) and my role is more of an instructional coach with 1h of release time per 6-day teaching cycle. I would say this is definitely not enough time to work with teachers in a way that impacts students.
Hi Tracy, very interesting post! One thing I noted in your post that you mentioned that your teacher that you interviewed, she suggested that she does not use technology much in her math class but she uses it more in her science class. As I was a new teacher last year, as a TOC, I got to teach in different classrooms and different subject areas. I came to realize that most science classrooms had technology incorporated in their lessons whereas every time I went to a Math classroom, most of the lessons that were left behind by teachers for me were traditional type lessons that did not involve much technology. Also, in my teaching experience, I used technology in my math classroom but not to a point where I could have used if I were teaching science or some other subject. It is making want to think that maybe Math is a subject that requires one to teach it the traditional way? Perhaps, there are not many examples out there that show how can technology be incorporated into a math classroom. Just my two cents. Great Post!
Oh jeez!! I’m sorry but I totally disagree!! I can’t imagine math without tech at this point! Instant feedback alone is a huge component to developing student understanding and confidence in math, especially for trickier, difficult-to-visualize topics like those found in Calculus. I would be wary of assuming that just because the math classrooms you observed didn’t incorporate tech that it means all classes run this way. Traditional lessons are great for building that “muscle memory” for students when they encounter algebraic manipulation and so on, but using tech allows for a massive jump in what’s possible for more conceptual “what if?” questions. Graphs can be stretched, translated and generally manipulated in any way we like, by any student, instead of students having to sketch them on paper only to find out 10 minutes later that they were wrong from the start. It allows for a level of exploration that was once impossible, or at the very least relegated to being a sort of “extension” activity for those students who either finished first or were the top of their class (or both). I could go on and on. There are myriad ways tech could be incorporated into a math classroom – it just starts with a little exploration. I would love for you and Trisha Roffey to connect, I’m sure you would have an absolutely fascinating discussion!
In the meantime, check this out!
https://teacher.desmos.com/
If you don’t have time to explore the Desmos resources yourself, I do recommend you watch the 1-minute YouTube video. Please share you thoughts if you like! 😀
Thank you for your thoughts, Scott! I’m very interested in making digital tools more useful in math classrooms. I wonder if the divide happens between elementary and primary schools? I definitely see more applications in high school math.
Speaking from a purely personal standpoint, I would like to see teachers taking up digital tools in a much deeper way and am frustrated with heel dragging. My mistake upon entering the MET was assuming that most teachers were like me and wanted to use digital tools to support learning but the more I move into a leadership role the more I find that teachers push back on integrating the tools. For that reason I’ve become very interesting in teacher onboarding.
Will definitely check out the tool and would love to pick your brain.
Hello again!
It’s quite possible that a divide happens between primary and elementary schools… I have to admit I don’t know too much about that age, school-wise! I do know that my wife teaches primary, though, and has had success teaching math with the help of robots like “Dot and Dash” and “Bee-bot”. Perhaps there is still hope, yet! 🙂 You can check out an example video of them in action (well, Stop Motion…) here: https://youtu.be/F6yE6aLaeVU
Platforms like Hour of Code and Scratch may be more computational thinking-related, but perhaps it’s just a matter of checking them out and seeing if others are interested!
Sometimes it just takes one person to model it in the context of your school to get the ball rolling… maybe…
Let me know if you have any specifics questions about Desmos or anything else!
Great resource! Thank you! Up until now I have always kind of looked at coding as algorithmic thinking that supported my students’ understanding of the equal sign, so I kind of wedged it into my curriculum.
I had an a-ha moment this week while I was at FETC and was trying to reconcile my thinking with how coding is math for young students in an authentic way and came to the conclusion that I was doing to much of the cognitive work for my students. In 3-act math tasks, students are presented with a problem and then asked to reason out where the problem is. (I like this problem: https://gfletchy.com/the-cookie-monster/)
And I realized the same can be true of coding for young students. I was personally trying to block code a robot with a certain number of blocks and was convinced the game maker hadn’t allowed for enough of the block I needed… then I realized that was a rich math task… funny the way sometimes an answer doesn’t occur to us until much later after asking a question.
The American vendors I spoke to this week were very keen on selling teachers on the fact that their programs were all linked to state standards and I thought how nice that would be to just buy a box and carry it into the classroom, but as Jonassen writes in Computers as Cognitive Tools, the one who does the designing is the one doing the work.
Hi Tracy,
Thanks for your post! When I viewed the case studies of elementary teachers earlier in this module I, too, was struck by how both the veteran and the new teachers had similar perspectives that hindered their integration of technology as more than anything but an occasional or extra tool. One of the issues I noted for my Framing Issues paper was that most teachers felt underprepared by their University training on how to integrate technology with sound pedagogy over various content areas. I wonder if, behind the scenes, the administrators of teacher preparation programs are finding their professors are equally reluctant to break out of the way its always been done in this respect?