The interviewee is a young energetic teacher who has been in the classroom for less than 5 years. She presently teaches mathematics at the secondary level at a prestigious, private, co-educational institution. The school has more resources than you would typically find at a public institution and the students are more likely to interact with technology at home than students at a public institution. The school population is also culturally diverse because many of the students are children of diplomats.

The interview was conducted after school around 5:00 pm. The interviewee indicated that she had just finished watching her students compete in a soccer match. We sat under a tree with bistro-type tables, which seems to be where the students sit and have lunch. The campus is a breath-taking, giving the impression that you are at a retreat in the mountains rather than at a high school. It was one of the most relaxing experiences I’ve had in a long time. We had originally planned to go out for yogurt and do the interview, but I am glad those plans changed because I think the setting helped to maintain the focus on technology and learning while providing a relaxing atmosphere that kept the interview more comfortable and conversational.

One of the things I have been pondering about our emphasis on technology, is the impact it has been having on the teaching-learning process. I entered the interview with the intention of hoping to find out the interviewee’s views on the importance of technology in learning. It was clear from the outset that she believes that technology is of significant value in educating today’s generation. The interviewee stated that because the students she teaches use technology in all other facets of their life then using it in the classroom will them “want to be integral in the learning-teaching process”. She also pointed to the level of engagement technology brings to her class, even in activities that she thought would be boring. The interviewee highlighted her experience with the Kahoot! learning platform.

“Initially I thought this is not fun – this is boring. How can they learn from these things? And    what I have come to realise is that they enjoy it; they find it exciting; they actually want to do it a lot.”

Technology has also proven to be very valuable in her teaching of the mathematics because it has helped to change her students’ perceptions of mathematics as being a difficult subject because they are enjoying it.

Later on in the interview, we touched on the issue of supporting teachers in their use of technology.  The interviewee noted one of the key features of this was the training teachers received. She stated that much of what she has learnt about technology, she found out by doing her own research and that it is more difficult for older teachers to feel comfortable using technology if they are not trained and so many of them shy away from using it. At her school there is an interest in providing greater training for teachers, but the financial resources required are not readily available.

One of the main takeaways from the interview a part from the need to support teachers was the fact that technology should not be viewed as a panacea that will ensure that learning happens. The interviewee stated

“They overuse technology though, in terms of they think that it is the end-all of teaching. So once you use technology the kids will learn. I don’t necessarily think that. It enhances the learning but it is not the end-all.”

The interviewee also pointed out that until students are not primarily assessed by summative examinations, as is the case in our locale, then the impact technology can have on learning will not be fully realised.

At the end of the interview, I came away thinking more about the value of technology as a tool for engaging students and enhancing the lesson but not be considered as a replacement for the core features that are necessary for learning to occur. I also recognised that training of teachers should be made a priority to ensure that technology was being used effectively in the classroom. The interviewee pointed out that whether we like it or not, technology is the language this generation uses so we have to make it a part of the teaching-learning process or we will lose them.

Keywords: Dilemma, Flip-classroom, Challenging

I decided to interview my sponsor teacher from my practicum two years ago. The reason why I decided to interview her was that she was the only teacher who I had seen using the “flip-classroom” teaching technique with her students in my two years of teaching/pre-service teaching experience. I am going to refer to her as Ms. P in the rest of my post. Ms. P has a Master’s degree in math education and has been teaching for over 15 years as a math teacher at a high school in Delta. She has been the head of the math department at her current school for about 5 years. I admired her teaching style her insights in math education during our small discussions during my practicum two years ago. While I was doing my practicum, I did not get a chance to try her “flip-classroom” teaching technique but I remember observing a few of her classes. Just to give some background on “flip-classroom” teaching technique, it is a teaching technique that has been known to be present for a little while. Students are asked to watch videos at home online, such as Khan Academy website and others, and they get to practice their practice questions in class while they can get help from their teacher if they run into a problem. While students are working on practice problems in class, they also use their phones and other devices to look at the videos they were to watch for homework at home, just to review some of the concepts.

I asked Ms. P if I could come in to interview her about her teaching technique and the how technology plays a grand role in this certain teaching technique. I met with her earlier this week and she gave me her whole 45 minutes of her lunchtime which I cannot thank her enough for. We decided to sit in her classroom while there were students dropping by to re-write a test or drop off an assignment or two.

As I asked Ms. P my first question about her experience with technology, she started laughing and told me that she is not the right person to talk about technology in a math classroom. I asked her why and she said she tried doing things “differently” for a year but technology seems to “win” every time. I still remember her stressing on these words in her explanation on why she was not the right person for this interview, “different” and “technology seems to win”, which I will get back to later. As I assured her that she still is the right person for this interview as she can share things that she has learned during her experience with her teaching techniques that involved technology.

As we got started, she started by praising whoever came up with the idea of flip-classroom teaching technique and how it is a brilliant idea to enhance student learning. The main reason why she thinks it’s a great teaching technique is that it gives her the whole class time to work with students one-on-one on problems that they may come across. She gets to see students struggle and learn and achieve all at the same time. All of that was possible because her students were doing their “classwork” at home where they were watching online videos, either prepared by Ms. P through YouTube or some other sources such as Khan Academy. Ms. P suggested that when she started this new teaching technique, she was very excited about it and so were the students. In the beginning, everything was great and most students were watching videos at home and working on problems in class and asking her questions to get the help they needed. However, she said it did not last long. I was interested to know why it did not work in the long run. Ms. P said that students started to start falling behind, more and more students came to class unprepared. They would either forget to watch their videos the night before class or they would go to the computer to watch the videos but get distracted instead and do other things. She said that this resulted in students not being able to do any of the practice questions during class and hence not ask questions to get help from Ms. P. She said as much as she was excited at the start of this teaching technique, it seemed to have fallen apart.

Ms. P said that she kept this going for the whole year just to be consistent with her class but decided that it was not going to work as it was difficult to make sure that all students watched their videos before coming to class. At this point, as much as I wanted to ask the rest of the questions on my question list, I wanted to know more about this certain situation. I was curious to know what she thought as a solution in the result of this situation. Ms. P suggested that the only solution she could think of was to go back to the traditional way of teaching. I asked her to explain why she thought that might be the solution as she could make some changes to her teaching technique and still continue with “flip-classroom” setting. She said that she wanted to keep teaching that way where students learned the information on their own at their own pace and asked me for help in person on whatever they did not understand. However, she said she could not trust her students with technology anymore. I was a little surprised by the statement she had made about technology. She suggested that technology has a lot to offer to us but teenagers and technology cannot be put together in an educational setting as there are way too many distractions. We ended the conversation by talking about if she is using technology in her current classroom setting in any form and she suggested she uses it for research or computational purposes but it is not a big part of her classroom. I thanked her from the bottom of my heart for giving me her time and sharing her experience with me and left with a lot of questions on my mind.

One of the main questions I had left this interview was, is Ms. P right about the distractions that technology brings with it can be the reason to step away from technology in an educational setting? I also wanted to think about two of the words she said at the beginning of the interview, “different” and that “technology seems to win”. I think when she said she wanted to do something different, she meant that trying technology is still out of the norm in our educational system. Majority of our classrooms are mostly based on traditional learning/ teaching styles. “Technology seems to win” was still bothering me as it was portraying technology as the culprit in the situation, which it is not. Ms. P’s teaching style did not work because her students did not have enough motivation to keep up with their homework and be consistent on watching videos at home every night, technology is not to be blamed here, in my opinion. Technology has a lot to offer to us if we learn how to use it in the right way and encourage our students to take use it in the same way, only then can “technology win”.

For this activity, I interviewed a colleague teaching at a K-8 public school in Ontario with a population of roughly 300 students. “Kathryn” has been teaching in public elementary education for 12 years and is a Drama and Music major who currently teaches 26 students in a 6/7 homeroom residing in one of only three closed classrooms in the building. She has been teaching sixth grade either as a straight or as a split for four years at this location. She teaches all subjects, except for French, PhysEd. and Visual Arts, including STEM subjects. As a Grade 6 teacher there is a particular focus on math because in Ontario sixth grade is a testing year for their province-wide standardized test. This school in general also has a school-wide improvement plan related to improving math scores overall as a goal for this year. The interview was conducted face-to-face on January 24, 2018 in a closed room over the lunch break.  Audio was recorded onto the interviewer’s phone.

While transcribing my interview with Kathryn three themes or topics wove a common thread through her responses: Competitive Play, Privacy, and Time+Expertise.

Competitive Play

Kathryn repeatedly used words related to the power of technology, particularly games, to connect, motivate, and engage students. She describes herself as “enthusiastic” towards technology integration and measures whether her views of technology have changed over the course of her 12 year career in terms related to her enthusiasm and the positive feelings she receives from student responses.  She identifies her favourite apps and the typical uses of technology in her teaching by relating them to how well students “connect” to a screen versus a textbook both for literary understanding and for engagement, and how “positive” her students are about getting to play.  She mentions the use of “competition” as a motivational tool and identifies several apps that her students respond positively to because of the competition created, referencing things like “it can be played like a race” and, “they can see their results real-time” and they compete to get them posted first .  She also uses “house leagues” in her classroom to manage her students and ties in the competitive aspects of certain favourite apps to these house league points and monthly celebrations for the winning team.

Privacy

Another theme that was repeated throughout the interview in one form or another was the value Kathryn perceived her students placed on technologies which allowed them to play and participate in real time but to do so anonymously if they chose. Kathryn’s class is a blend of introverted and gregarious preteen boys and girls, some with persistent behaviour challenges stemming from underlying anxiety disorders. The option for students to engage with or without broadcasting their identity to their peers was mentioned positively more than once.  She identified her wish that the school provided the money such that every student could have their own device “that doesn’t come from home so we could have more control over it” and that would then allow her to “really differentiate instruction but in a private way” [emphasis in original].  It’s clear that Kathryn respects the sensitivities of her students and finds value in technological tools that allow their wish for privacy and teacher-student confidentiality to be maintained even while engagement and differentiation are being leveraged.

Time+Expertise

By far the biggest theme weaving through my discussion with Kathryn was that of time. Technology examples which she used and praised almost always had qualifiers such as “efficient”, “productive”, “that I didn’t have to make”, “saves time”, “not reinventing the wheel”, allows the class to “get through [content] more quickly”, “doesn’t take as much [class] time”.  The problems she identified with technology were the converse, described in terms such as how they “hold us back”, “I don’t have the time to sit down and search for what I need”, “takes me awhile”.  When asked whether she felt she needed to be an expert to integrate technology into STEM subjects she answered immediately, “No, I need time. I don’t need expertise I need time.”  However, I noticed that when asked to expand on this, her example connected the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an app she is unfamiliar with to the deficit in time and the slow down of productive work in her classroom. During transcription, I made the following note: Although K said she did not need to be an expert, her example of time actually is built on the inference that a lack of expertise on her part in how to model and troubleshoot and train her students due to changing updates was the reason that time became the issue in the first place.

This dual theme of expertise having an impact on time arose again at the end of the interview when questions dealt with what she felt her school could do to better support teachers using technology in her building and the biggest hindrance in supporting elementary students in STEM learning.  She identified the lack of content expertise (“specialized instruction”) in elementary teachers of STEM and the lack of well-trained, available support teachers for technology assistance and training for the rest of the staff.  She stated that for technology use in STEM or any subject to support student learning in greater measures in more classrooms, schools needed to “devise a system that doesn’t make one person responsible for its success. We need more staff for those types of things and more training.”  Lack of money for these human resources and technologies was identified as the root of these deficiencies, however the underlying themes remain that Kathryn feels teachers in general are not given adequate access to and/or made sufficient experts in technology for educational purposes and this lack of expertise increases the amount of time individual teachers must invest to teach themselves technology and simultaneously decreases the amount of class time available for efficient, productive work when the teacher feels ill-equipped to both train her students in, and troubleshoot any issues that arise during, its use.

Depth, Accessibility and Differentiation

This assignment had me interviewing a colleague name Trina. She works in a K-9 school situated in Alberta. Trina has been teaching grade 5 for three years, transitioning from four years of teaching grade 1. The interview was conducted after the school day in an empty classroom in Trina’s school. Trina currently has 23 students and has taught math and science in both grade 1 and grade 5. Her classroom has one-to-one Chromebooks as well as a cart of iPads that can be brought in. While Trina is not responsible for any technology programming school wide, she is well versed in a variety of technologies and runs the school yearbook club.

In talking with Trina, three main themes came up regarding technology: depth, accessibility and independence.

Depth

Trina communicated to me that technology facilitates a depth of learning that is far deeper than a textbook and often goes further than what an individual teacher can provide. She remarked, “they [students] have access to all the teachers on the internet that can help explain a concept they are having trouble with.” She also explained that science is her favourite subject to teach because there are online resources that show “what I [Trina] am not able to show.” An example of this would be the exchange of electrons with electricity.

When speaking about students’ today, she remarked that “I think they have a really, really unique experience.” She went on to explain this is because they have close proximity to such an abundance of information, whereas during Trina’s education her learning ended with the worksheet or the textbook.

Accessibility

 It came up a couple of times in the interview how accessibility to technology is key, and through that most all known information is then accessible. When comparing the one-to-one Chromebooks with the old days of a computer lab she clearly established “A computer lab is not accessible.” She went further to explain that one-to-one access is essential because it provides them the chance to have a more realistic interaction with the technology. She finds that her students use the technology often, “If they are reading and find a word they don’t understand, they pull out their Chromebook right there.” Accessibility enables students to not be ‘left hanging’ if they are wondering about a topic.

In a conversation with Trina after our interview, she reiterated the fact that having a lab is simply not sufficient in today’s world. Students need to be able to taught how to properly manage instant access to devices.

Independence

 In listening through the recording again when transcribing, it jumped out at me how much Trina emphasized the ability of technology to facilitate the creation of independent learners. She went so far as to state that students “need to learn how to be able to learn, rather than learn specific things we want them to learn.” While she did also mention that the curriculum is important, Trina saw the world as rapidly changing, and was clear that she things the ‘sage on the stage’ days of learning are dead.

When analyzing the interview further, Trina seemed to see this independence in a few different ways. Firstly, it gives the students a chance to independently learn about topics of their choosing. They are not restricted to topic in a text or books in a library. Secondly, it allows independent programming (differentiation) when dealing most specifically with math. Thirdly, it allows them to become independent learners. Learning both on their own time, or answering their own questions in class using technology

I interviewed a co-worker, let’s call her Sharon, who currently teaches Mathematics, primarily statistics, at a Canadian-based college in the Middle East. She has “been teaching since 1970” and “started at a community college”, then worked at an aviation college for 10 years until 2000, then did instructional design followed by three years in the Cayman Islands then at a Canadian college in the Middle East for the last 12 years. The interview took place at the college in Sharon’s office, on a Tuesday mid-January, starting at 9:30am. I asked her 8 questions, including some probing questions throughout, and those initial questions can be found on the course wiki. As an aside, Sharon is doing more with tech than most others in our department and she’s nearly 70! It just goes to show age is not always an indicator of resistance to tech!

(Full Transcript can be found here: https://goo.gl/D9eFmv)

“I’ll be 70 in March. I’m going to have a spinning party as I have every year. Maybe this year I’ll actually fill all 35 bikes!” *laughs*

I asked her if she’s always used tech, to which she replied “yes. Since 1990 I think. Since the beginning of time, since the [TI graphing calculators] became available. I was the first one I think, in Canada, to use that graphing calculator in post-secondary school.”

The following points are sort of “themes” that arose throughout the interview, and ones I feel best represent Sharon’s views. Those themes are:

1. Fear of tech
2. Meeting the Student at their level
3. Building confidence and understanding through Examples and Exploration
4. The importance of Thoughtful Selection of tools for the task.

Fear

Fear and discomfort surrounding tech is a common occurrence both on the teacher’s side as well as for parents and students. “If it’s somebody that doesn’t want to use technology, then the battle begins before the learning begins”.
Back in the 90’s when Sharon was working at the aviation college, “I got to use [graphing calculators] but the students weren’t allowed to carry this calculator in any other classes. In electricity, where they would have 5 equations 5 unknowns, [the teachers] never ever wanted an answer. The teacher would get them to get as far as to the end but then never work anything out. They banned the calculator in aviation in 2000; by this time all the high schools were using it, and they banned it!”

In this case the college was unwilling, or uncomfortable, to use this new tech tool to improve student programs or learning, insisting that they should still work everything out by hand, even when they had a strongly motivated woman to spearhead its use. “I was the only math person in aviation, I went to all of the promotion meetings, and they moved me to another department and I quit”.

Tech has a tendency to make parents uncomfortable as well, in many cases due to them wanting the best for their children. However, sometimes there is a real benefit to being open to change. A funny story told by my Sharon went:

Parent: “When I was at school I didn’t use a calculator”
Sharon: “Yeah, and how did you do in high school math?”
Parent: “Well, I failed”
Sharon: “Well, maybe we shouldn’t take your daughter along that same path”

It is not unusual for there to be tension when new methods and strategies rub up against perceived notions of how something “should” be done. This often happens when someone has become very comfortable doing things a specific way for years and they feel discomfort when their views come into question. Sharon told another story of a student who complained in her online course, saying “I’m from the old school, you know, I’m not computer-savvy”. To which she thought “well you should never have taken an online course! Like learning to dance if you’ve got no legs, it just makes absolutely no sense to me.” She was joking, of course, but it leads to a good point – we need to meet the students on their level and build them up.

Meeting the Student

Sharon has a number of strategies for promoting student success and building confidence in skills, one of which is to use notebooks and translate the class content.

“Funny, I’m on a real bender now of them having a notebook, because I believe – I call it “studentese”- that they need to write and do what I’ve done in their own language.” She teaches almost entirely students who have English as a Foreign Language, so I thought this was a really fantastic idea; students are encouraged to process what they’ve been told by making notes to themselves in their own language.

She also had some great thoughts on the benefits of working out math by hand even when they have calculators, because it helps the students to build their logic skills.

“If you don’t know what you did in numbers then doing algebraic fractions is almost impossible, [but] if I said to [you] ‘what’s the common denominator of 6 and 24?’, you’d know that from having done many questions”. She suggests a sort of muscle memory for math that creates a base for all work to come; a base that once stable can allow for students to use calculators to get to the answer quicker while still understanding what those answers mean.

Finally, she would build the understanding from the student outwards by having them “write the recipe that gets me adding two fractions together”, for example. She called it “math in words” and I thought it was a great idea. She called this being able to “see the maneuvers” as they are forced to think through the question.

Examples and Exploration

Once a foundation is set for the student, the real fun begins. For Sharon this comes in the form of building confidence and understanding through examples and exploration, and using tech as a means of getting there. The basis of her philosophy comes from her belief that “students must have some vision of what’s going on”, and if they don’t they are simply “mimicking you”. She believes tech can help them develop that vision.

She gave some very interesting examples that I’ll share:

• “If I said to [a student] ‘you’re on a 15-foot cliff and you kick a football up into the air, what will that look like?’ and then, because you’ve been told the formula you fill that in, that still doesn’t mean you can see that the y-intercept is 15, and the ball is arcing in a parabola”. She’s suggesting that it is entirely possible for students to “regurgitate” values, even when “they have no idea; they followed a pattern and came out the other side”.
• In stats, “without [tech] I would have to wait for them to draw everything I wanted to do”. With it, the students get instant feedback, allowing time for “what if” cases that develop confidence and understanding. “I call it ‘what if’ because it allows me to change one little thing and now they have a whole new ball game; a new everything. I can’t imagine not using it”.
• “The challenge is to come up with questions that show that they understand the procedure rather than the rote math. You’re not taking your old test and having them have the calculator do the work for them. That’s an insult to the student and to you.” I think this is a huge struggle that many teachers face – how to modify existing materials to make the best use of new teaching and learning methods?

This tricky choice of how to modify materials leads into a bigger discussion, one involving the importance of thoughtfully selecting tools.

Thoughtful Selection

“I work so hard to make it work.”

Just because digital tech could be used to do things traditionally done without it doesn’t mean it should be. Sharon brought up points on this subject again and again:

• On the topic of using iPads for notetaking and textbooks, “as far as the students writing [notes] on the iPad, it didn’t happen. I think there were lots of reasons for that. It really needed something that allows you to write and save your notes. And you know, there are people that won’t read ebooks because they want the feeling of books”. In this case, simply substituting paper for an iPad actually worsened the student experience, and students who preferred paper over e-text were left at a disadvantage.
• “Excel, for instance, can’t do this question” *she points to a simple frequency table*. “I have to write a page of commands into Excel, so I’m actually working out [problems] by hand. How ridiculous is that? It’s disappointing. I work so hard to make it work.” it’s funny, Sharon is using Excel, a program known of crunching numbers, and it can’t even solve a simple stats problem for her without extensive manual work. Sharon’s struggles likely reflect those of many teachers; we are often expected to learn so much for the benefit of our students, yet if the tools chosen don’t fit student needs it’s a giant waste of time.
• “Using PowerPoint for mathematics is outrageous. I’ve done the question already, how boring is that? Seeing a PowerPoint of my solutions? But when I come to teach research design PowerPoint is a great tool!” Again, thoughtful selection means everything.

Final Thoughts

I was shocked at how much of what Sharon said throughout her interview resonated with me, and reminded me of discussions I’ve had throughout this program. I didn’t prime her for this interview at all yet she, at 70 years old, echo’d struggles and vocalized opinions similar to those found on these posts. I’m a little behind this week, but I’m looking forward to reading the abstracts of others to see if there are any similarities!

I’ll leave you with an interesting statement made by Sharon:
“Sometimes what they’re used to seeing makes them happier than seeing something new”.
Do you agree? Does comfort in familiarity sometimes take precedence over subjecting our students to a constant barrage of new tech?

Thanks so much for reading,
Scott

For this exercise, I interviewed a colleague at Pickering College, an independent K-12 school with about 450 students. “Jackie” has been teaching Math for over 17 years and is currently teaching academic and enhanced Math in Grades 10-12. She is also the Math Department Head, so she has played a main role in the recent update of the school’s K-12 Math Program. The interview was conducted face-to-face on January 23, 2018 in one of the small meeting rooms and audio recorded using an iPad. My goal for the session was to determine any commonalities in the technologies that she thought were effective in her classroom, and explore the implications for future technologies.

Real-Time

Several of the technologies that Jackie highlighted in the interview emphasized the benefit of real-time “data” to improve instruction. For instance, Microsoft OneNote is currently being used not only as a virtual notebook, but also to understand student thinking and give “direct feedback” when necessary. Game based quizzing platforms like Kahoot not only makes learning engaging for students, but also enables Jackie to quickly “know who understands” concepts without singling out each student for an answer.  Classroom activities in Desmos gives Jackie the ability to “see them (students) complete each screen in real-time” which helps her understand which students are struggling and need additional guidance.

Speed

Another common thread that Jackie emphasized throughout the interview was the ability of certain technologies to quickly engage student minds and eliminate misconceptions. For instance, an application like Geogebra helps teachers to show shapes and graphs “from almost any angle” thus improving the visualization of concepts. Similarly, Desmos makes the “teaching of ideas more smooth and less tedious” by simplifying the creation and manipulation of graphs which enables the user to focus on understanding the concepts. From a technical perspective, the consistency of the well established 1-to-1 laptop program enables teachers/students to get on task; it also gives teachers the confidence to try new applications.

Location

The last common thread from the interview was the use of technology platforms to extend learning beyond the traditional classroom. For instance, Jackie uses Microsoft OneNote to deliver units and entire online courses with the addition of Khan Academy, Edpuzzle, and other applications. From a curricular perspective, “the Math curriculum in Ontario for High School is very pre-calculus based and sometimes that takes up so much effort that we are losing interesting things that students would be able to engage with.” Within the newly developed Senior School Enhanced Math Program, the plan is to integrate STEM to increase the breadth of learning and go outside the expectations of the Ontario curriculum.

This interview continues to develop certain questions in my head about the future of educational technology. It is certain that computers have to the ability to be faster and more accurate at many tasks. In the past 5 years, my school has integrated a couple Math practice applications that boast intelligent real-time analysis, to guide students with precise differentiation and speed, in a fully online platform that can be accessed from any location with an Internet connection. Will these types of AI (artificial intelligence) driven systems fundamentally change learning and redefine the purpose of teachers?

For my interview, I interviewed Mr.H, a colleague at my current school.  Mr.H and I have been colleagues for two years now and have enjoyed a few ventures exploring technology at our school.  Last year, he was assigned to a grade 4/5 class and we often participated in co-teaching lessons involving technology as buddy projects.  This year, he has taken on the tech teacher role at our school and is responsible for all of the digital technology.  He has been teaching for the past 8 years and has spent time teaching in the States, overseas and has now settled in the lower main land.

We conducted our interview at 3pm after school on a Friday.  It ran about 30 minutes with a few interruptions from other colleagues.  As we conducted the interview, I was surprised and intrigued by the experiences he had with technology during his professional development program and how he uses his understanding to plan lessons with technology now.  The three main themes that came to mind as I reflected on our interview were: failure is ok, collaboration throughout the school, and plan for the skill.

Failure is OK!

1. Research has indicated that teachers are hesitant to integrate technology into their practice due to the perceived lack of support and personal experience. How would you describe your experience in developing a sense of confidence when implementing technology into the classroom?

COLLABORATION throughout the school

2. How do you think the school/district has helped or hindered your implementation of technology in the classroom?

Plan for the SKILL!

3. What tips or strategies would you suggest to teachers looking to introduce STEM into their classroom? In what ways can they introduce different subjects or topics into a joint project?

For my interview, I decided to talk to two teachers at my school- the first is a Math teacher in our high school, and the second is our Educational Technology coordinator. The interviews were conducted in a classroom at the international school I work at. Teacher X is an IB DP and MYP teacher, who is teaching Grades 6,7,9,11, and 12 this year, and is in his second year at the school. Previously, he worked at a private school in Brazil. Teacher Y is a technology integration specialist, who has also been teaching internationally for a number of years. His current position is coordinator for technology integration and education, but his role has evolved during his time here. He is also in his second year at the school. The interviews were conducted separately, and the set of questions varied slightly, as indicated below:

Both Teachers X and Y:

1. How has integrating technology affected your teaching practice?
2. What are the biggest challenges you face in integrating technology in your classroom? Within your school?
3. Are 1:1 device programs necessary for integrating technology effectively in mathematics/science? Are students at an advantage if they do have their own device?

Teacher X:

1. Which topics in math and science are best supported by the use of technology?
2. Are there any ways that you have previously used it that you deemed ineffective?
3. Does digital technology allow you to do anything that isn’t possible using traditional teaching methods?

Teacher Y:

1. What type of students do you think benefit most from using technology?
2. How do you use and model technology in teacher professional development?
3. Do you feel it is important or necessary that you as the teacher/coach are an expert with the technology? Why or why not?

The key themes I found were:

Infrastructure

Both spoke to the need for good infrastructure for learning, and how important it is that the systems are in place school-wide, if initiatives are going to be effective. One of the important factors are personnel and having the availability to work closely with classroom teachers. In his current role, Teacher Y states that his time is divided unevenly, in what he feels is an imbalance, as he works in both the elementary and the high school as a coordinator and implementer. He says, “On the two ends of the spectrum, I get to spend not very much time with people who have decent practice, and I spend much more time with people who have more ‘growth areas’ I’ll say, vis-à-vis technology, so there’s a certain group of staff that are under-served, if not unserved by me being here.” Teacher X’s view on good infrastructure focused instead on the idea of good habits within the classroom for the students. He stated that it was important for the students to be taught explicitly how to use their devices, particularly as they can quickly become distractions. Of importance is that our school runs a 1:1 device program in the high school. He said, “[challenges] especially with the younger ones [are] managing expectations of appropriate use and being on task. It’s something they get better at, and it’s something that has to be taught alongside the actual content of your course. How to use a device appropriately, how to use it properly, when to put it away”. The transformative experiences within the math and science classrooms come after students learn to be responsible with technology. School-wide, this can be as intensive as a digital citizenship curriculum, or as simple as time allocated to teach appropriate device usage.

Whole-picture

I asked Teacher Y to tell me a little about who he thought benefitted most from technology, and his ideas came with a bit of narrative from his time as a teacher and as a coordinator studying best practice. He insisted that the technology is only part of the picture, and that “the ones with good teachers” benefitted the most. He said, “I think if I had answered this question 10 years ago, I would have said, ‘kids with learning disabilities’, or something else, because I think that the way we were looking at tech integration a while back was like, ‘start with remediation’. We were looking at tech as a way to catch up kids who were behind, as opposed to looking for ways to make kids at the top move forward.” Both Teacher X and Teacher Y’s experience impressed me, but Teacher Y’s proficiency in the whole-picture approach made me appreciate and value the people I work with even more. Naturally, it’s necessary to step back and evaluate technology usage in this way; both interviewees insisted that “tech for the sake of tech is bad practice”, however Teacher Y went in-depth about what makes integration effective. He talked about previous schools, and how good practices were reinforced, in addition to places where he was actively seeking out opportunities on his own to further his understanding, because it wasn’t supported by the school. Upon asking him about devices and access to technology, he reiterated his point about good teaching and replied, “1:1 devices are an advantage, maybe. If you’re in the right classroom, absolutely”.

Questioning

Teacher X spoke a bit about how tech has affected his practice, how technology “has made me more efficient”, and spoke about the ways in which it manifests itself in an inquiry-based classroom. It allows students to question openly about new concepts, or in his words, “when something interesting comes up, it’s much more natural to take an interesting question and run with it, than be forced to plan everything that has to be done ahead of time. It allows for more inquiry. You get more authentic and interesting questions and results.”

Additionally, Teacher X commented that it can help facilitate learning and catalyze commentary/inquiries among the students and with him. He says, “I like academic conflict, I like when kids have different answers. They come to different conclusions based on something, and when they’re seeing what each other thinks, it’s a really nice way to stop and pause and resolve everything, because there’s a bit of an incentive. Kids want to be right, and you can kind of exploit that, to kind of get them into this idea, and I think if you have the right culture that it’s okay to be wrong, then it’s not a problem. You’re trying to resolve something. When you have that kind of culture in the classroom, tech makes it easier to share viewpoints and then ultimately get resolution, which is satisfying for everyone.” Not only resolution, but this also helps create questions to do further research on a topic, as the conversations spur more curiousity.

Though Teacher X spoke about a range of different technologies that he has used and continues to use, his reasoning for sometimes opting for the simple use of technology caught my attention. Using technology to enhance learning and dispel misconceptions in the math and science classroom works if all students have access to the understandings and vocabulary. He brought up the point of “… this idea of using videos or images to present something interesting, when it’s a video or image and no words, no text, it has a really low barrier for entry, and I think this is really important for kids who are new to English, kids with learning disabilities”, which was poignant for me.