Change and Choice in Technology

With new technologies coming at us so fast, it’s difficult to decide what choices to make. If you are a school administrator, you may be attempting to be a change agent for innovations you are sure will be perfect for your school. But before you do, think about the consequences of what you are doing. Will your teachers “buy in” to your ideas and if you think they won’t, or at least some won’t, how do you get them to make a turn around? According to Dean Shareski, Tech & Learning, teachers as professionals need to have a choice about what they do. As Bob Tschannen-Moran in his book, Evocative Coaching wrote, they don’t “resist making changes; they resist the people who try to make them change.” Therefore, it seems that teachers need to be given time to move forward and make their own investment in technologies.  So what do you do when you want to, for example, give all students iPads to work on their studies? Some teachers will take off with the digital device, while others may ignore them no matter how much in-service education they receive in how to use the technology. I’ve often said that educators are for change as long as the change doesn’t affect them.  Some administrators believe that you have to force change for curriculum innovations such as this, because if students are given digital devices, they, and their parents, will expect teachers to make use of them, and if some teachers have excellent content on course pages such as Moodle, parents and students will expect all teachers to do likewise. For some change, perhaps the time has come when teachers simply have to accept the change and work with it as best they can. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are being forced to change the way they teach or the content covered. It does mean that they will be using different tools for inspiring learning.