June 2006 — Features
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Teaching with Technology: The Secrets of Their Success
The district standardized on a generic Microsoft core, allowing automatic installation software native to Microsoft to help manage more than 18,000 desktops overseen by only 10 technicians. “CDW-G as well as Dell have been key in that,” says Wright. “We don’t fix things anymore. We swap them out, send them back, and they get fixed under their warranty or their maintenance agreement.”
But all this technology would be useless without teacher training. “To teach successfully with technology, teachers have to be prepared by understanding the hardware and software they use. Everyone’s looking for the magic tool. Go to any educational computing conference, and you’ll witness hundreds, if not thousands, of ‘perfect applications.’ Most schools bite off many more of these than they can chew. Even if the application is valuable, its value is never fully achieved. It’s better to have five tools that we really know how to use well, rather than 25 tools we don’t.”
'THE TEACHER IS A BROKER OF LEARNING'—AND OTHER LESSONS FROM LESOTHO
An influential educator finds that much of what he learned long ago as a Peace Corps member still guides his thinking today.
IN THE LATE 1960S, Tom Carroll was among the first batch of US citizens to enlist in a highly trained, elite crew to be sent off to foreign lands—not to fight wars, but as part of the newly created Peace Corps. On assignment, he went to the South African enclave of Lesotho. He says his experiences there steer his approach to today’s educational issues.
Back then, Lesotho was newly independent, having been a British trust territory for more than 100 years. “Essentially,” Carroll says, “in those 100 years, nothing changed.” In the thin, cool air of the Drakensberg mountains, “the schools were comparable to US schools 100 years ago. Most had one teacher; big villages had two or three. No electricity, no telephones. It was a standalone teacher with a textbook in a one-room schoolhouse. While we’ve had signifi- cant change in the United States, my sense is that we still have too many teachers who are still teaching in that kind of an environment.”
Carroll’s current leadership efforts as president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) are aimed at raising standards for teaching and learning, improving professional development, and restructuring school environments so the needs of all students are met. Before leading NCTAF, he was founding director of a Department of Education program called Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology, through which he awarded $275 million over three years to support redesign of teacher preparation programs using new technologies.
Interestingly, part of the Peace Corps’ mission in the late 1960s was to support teacher professional development. “We rode on horseback from village to village, school to school, meeting individually with teachers, working on instruction and curriculum issues,” says Carroll. “Professional development was face-toface,” he says. “It’s a stark contrast to what we have today in this country: powerful connectivity for teachers to all kinds of learning resources, to their colleagues, and a tremendous opportunity for teachers to teach as members of collaborative professional communities or teams.”
“With no other resources, the teacher has to be everything,” Carroll says, reflecting on his experiences 40 years ago. “But with technology, the teacher’s role changes to a broker of learning— someone who connects students to the many resources in the classroom, across the district, in public libraries and museums, at the universities, across the country, and around the world.We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we taking advantage of that?’”
