At your school, how difficult is it to integrate technology with your lessons?

 
TeAch-nology.com's Teacher Poll of the Week
At your school, how difficult is it to integrate technology with your lessons?
Easy
Moderate
Difficult


View Results
TeAch-nology.com
 

Technology is everywhere and there's no escaping it. Preparing our students for life after school has to incorporate a basic familiarity with technology. Only a quarter of teachers who took this poll felt that it was easy to integrate technology into their regular lessons. The remaining respondents were almost evenly split between the task being moderate or difficult.

Perhaps a lack of access to computers is the problem at some schools. Many classrooms have one or two computers but not enough to accommodate their use during regular lesson time. Rotating times where students have access to the computer is time consuming and inefficient. If the school has a computer lab, or centralized location where an entire bank of computers are kept, that room and its equipment is usually shared amongst all the students in the school. In order for the entire school to have access to the room classroom teachers must either request time or it is scheduled on a rotating basis. Many students receive a few computer classes per week.

When students have computer access only a few times per week there is a limited amount of work that can be accomplished. Often teachers will assign a research or presentation project that will be worked on during computer time. The submission deadline will reflect the amount of time students will have access to the room. If there are no projects pending, computer time may be spent learning new software or practising research skills.

This scenario applies to many students at the elementary level. Secondary students fair even worse. Unless their course load includes computer classes, access it very limited. Many, but not all, students have home computers where they work on assignments as homework. Given the limited access that many students have to school computers it is not difficult to understand why approximately three quarters of teachers find integrating technology into regular lessons a challenge.

Unless more funding begins raining down on school districts, this situation doesn't look like it will change any time in the near future. Teachers continue to do their best with the resources at hand and incorporate the use of technology when feasible. For students in less affluent areas that have no access to a computer at home learning opportunities are, unfortunately, more limited. In order to present equal opportunities to all students, everyone must be on a level playing field. In many areas this scenario simply does not exist.