I recently read The Technology Fix by William D. Pflaum, and in one of his chapters he visited a high school in a major city in the Southeast. The school district purchased the initial start up using federal grants and then have to have the money from their budget to continue to support the projects though rising costs and declining economic issues make this more difficult. At Longworth, the students use the technology on a daily basis. As a math teacher two teachers caught my eye as I was reading. The first was the technology coordinator, Ramona, who teaches her students the Oracle programming. The teacher engages students and demonstrates how the course is important and applicable. Students are engaged and hold each other accountable. In the book the author describes the reaction when he asks the question "What's the biggest challenge in this class?" The student answer's were "The network is down 25 percent of the time"..."I don't have a computer at home" and other students responded that the computer lab is open in the morning and that the student could go to the library and the consensus that the network was actually only down "2 to 3 percent of the time." The other teacher that attracted my attention was the 9th grade math teacher, Larry Purcell, who uses the computer labs to complete several Microsoft Excel activities. He felt this was important because it prepares the students for the future and that is what he thinks about for them.
I taught at Martin Luther King High School in the Philadelphia School District for four years before moving to the Methacton School District. I really felt that this story was where the Philadelphia School District (PSD) is heading. My first year as a teacher I couldn't get enough technology. I started with an LCD projector, shining typed notes on the chalkboard and writing over top of the notes. I would speak with every administrator and ask for more technology or anything that they had. At the time my school only had a handful of Promethean Interactive Whiteboards. The next year ten SMARTboard Interactive Whiteboards were added and the year after that a SMARTboard was installed in my room and a Macbook laptop. The district did an excellent job training the teachers, by sending each to several full day professional development sessions on SMARTnotebook and the tools that teachers could use in their classrooms. What is going on now in PSD is a lack of funding. As teachers are getting laid off, I can see the technology advances slowing down or halting as in the Longworth High School the upkeep of the system was estimated to cost $300,000 and the school's budget was only $10,000.
The students were very excited when the whiteboard was installed and I started using it right away. The buy-in was greater and I was able to relate more math concepts to them by directing them into more real life applications through the internet. My students had a passion for the internet and I integrated it into the lessons as often as I could. I believe that technology will always expand the education of the students and as a future principal I want to be able to use the tools that are provided to their best potential. The one thing that Pflaum mentioned was that their were many tools (software, DVD's and programs) that were not being used and some even never opened. The biggest point he had to make on this was that if teachers do not have time to understand these programs then they are not going to be because the teachers don't have buy in. Teachers need to have training and feel that the courses that they are using are going to help the students. As principals, we need to be able to show the teachers how to use the data and give the teachers choices when at all possible on which software to use. When we do this rather than just randomly dropping software or a new program each year we will empower our teachers and build an engaged learning environment.
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