Summary: Use of Technology in Classrooms to Meet Technology Content Standards

Title: “A Quantitative Study Examining Faculty Members’ Beginning Use of Technology To Meet Technology Contents Standards.”

Name: Manuel Gómez

Date: 12/14/09

Reference: “A Quantitative Study Examining Faculty Members’ Beginning Use of Technology To Meet Technology Contents Standards.”

Boulay, Rachel & Fulford, Catherine

Department of Educational Technology, University of Hawaii

Presented at 31^st annual proceedings 2008 Orlando. Selected Research and Development Papers. Presented at The Annual Convention of the Association

For Educational Communications and Technology.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/43/77/88.pdf

Problem: How to help teachers become proficient using technology in their classrooms, and how to make that technology, an integral part of the curriculum. Thereby, making it interactive with students, so that students can learn how to become proficient in the use of technology as well.

Context: Since 1994 the United States Federal Government passed legislation creating national standards of technology for students five through eighteen. Since then many programs were developed with many different foci. The Department of Educational Technology at the University of Hawaii introduced a program to help faculty, with the use of mentors, develop a curriculum that included the use of technology in their daily teaching. The university created “Technology Intensive Standards.” These standards are divided into 6 categories: Ethics, Operations, Analysis, Retrieval, Applications, and Attitudes. These standards would be the guiding thoughts for educators to follow, while developing curriculum and use of technology.

There were 78 faculty members. Each member was assigned a mentor, who worked one on one, on a weekly basis for a period of two years. The use of mentors is still considered the most promising strategy to help educators in instructional materials, use of technology in courses, and discussions with other participants.

Findings: They all developed new curriculums in their classes with the help of mentors and worked hard to implement technology in their regular teaching based on the Technology Intensive Standards.

The mentoring program was very successful; the intervention was divided in three different tiers. The first tier was to set goals for professional development, the second tier was to provide mentoring expertise to create a curriculum, and the third tier was to provide assistance in improving their technical skills in order to integrate the curriculum.

The program was also very successful in creating new curriculum involving technology and helping students create projects using the new technology offered to them. Unfortunately for this study, only 4 out of the 6 categories of technology intensive standards were used by educators and were included in their curriculum development. They were the categories of operations, analysis, retrieval, and applications. One of the two standards that were not utilized by educators was the standard of ethics, which considers the use of print and electronic technology ethically and responsibly. And the second standard not used was the standard of attitudes, which recognizes changing technologies to make informed choices about their appropriateness. The participants in the study ignored these two standards.

Recommendations:

I believe educators are interested in continuing development of new curriculum to help students understand new technology available. However, at the same time, we are learning how to use it in our classroom. It is a shame that we are giving little consideration in teaching ethics and responsibility; these standards are relegated to the back. Districts need to set standards in this area and teachers need to follow them closer.