Investing in technology will impact administration, students and teachers, and the community.

How can the administration use technology?

• Administrator’s new responsibilities must include supporting the efforts of their staff to adopt and adapt new technologies in order to achieve new levels of productivity and achievement.
• In effect, managers must provide the vision of change that includes empowering teachers and learners in new ways and then must learn how to effectively manage these empowered teachers and learners.
• Administration - much broader and more fluid group of players and functions to manage.
• Administrative uses of technology allow teachers to spend less time on cumbersome paperwork and more time on educational content and working with students.
• "In many ways, the schools of brick and tradition we have built or inherited are threatened. Our schools may yet incorporate the use of the Internet deep into their psyche and embrace global learning opportunities, or they may ignore the implications of an on-line environment, only to find that they, like the clergy in a post-Gutenberg press world, are no longer the primary brokers of learning and education."

How will students and teachers be impacted with the implementation of new technology?

• There is less "teaching" when learning is happening online.
• "…teaching in an on-line setting challenges teachers to shift paradigms and use a constructivist model of learning that creates roles for other mentors and experts."
• Teacher from sage on the stage to guide on the side: mentor and coach.
• Teachers collaborate more.

Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow

ACOT summary of impact on teachers:

• "As ACOT teachers became comfortable with the technology, they reported they were enjoying their work more and feeling more successful with their students. Over time, they also reported that they interact differently with their students - more as guides or mentors and less like lecturers. In fact, their personal efforts to make technology an integral part of their classrooms caused them to rethink their most basic beliefs about education and opened them to the possibilities of redefining how they went about providing opportunities for students to learn. "
• Shift that occurred in classrooms as the ACOT teachers extended their traditional views of teaching and learning - from instruction to knowledge construction:

• Teachers and students become producers, not just users, of information.
• Students take part in advanced placement courses, archaeology programs originating from the bottom of the sea, chemistry experiments, college courses and enrichment programs.
• Teachers network with each other to share instructional practices.
• Teachers and students access information more frequently and cost effectively
• Students take more responsibility for their own learning, work at their own pace and correct many of their own errors.

In SRI Report (page 2) it was found that when the discrete skills approach is discarded and students are given tasks that are meaningful and challenging to them (e.g., describe your city through an exhibit for museum visitors), the result will be working on basic and advanced skills together (e.g., preparing displays will require attention to both high-level issues of content and design and the basic skills of writing mechanics). It will also usually involve doing multidisciplinary work (e.g., describing the city means assembling geographic and historical information as well as practicing composition skills). Such authentic tasks not only bread with the convention of holding off on work involving advanced skills until mastery of basic skills has been demonstrated but also transcend the traditional disciplinary boundaries that are used to break up the typical school day into short segments. The greater complexity of such tasks puts pressure on the convention of small blocks of time for individual activities. Serious intellectual activity requires more than 50 minutes of concentrated attention.

Technology offers the opportunity to change the roles that teachers and students have traditionally played. With technology dispensing information, teachers are free to coach and facilitate students learning. With technology monitoring learning, students can become active learners, working to effectively acquire new skills as they solve problems. If the goal of creating high-performance learning organizations is to be realized, the reinvention of American education has to incorporate these new tools."

Frank Paul Elementary School, Salinas, CA; The Open School, Los Angeles Unified School District

Effects of Technology on Teaching and Learning

• Technology implementation often stimulates teachers to present more complex tasks and material.
• Introduction of technology will tend to support teachers in becoming coaches rather than dispensers of knowledge.
• Technology use increases teachers’ sense of professionalism and achievement.
• Technology can motivate students to attempt harder tasks and to take more care in crafting their work.

Impact in Schools Beau Fly Jones and others, "Designing Learning and Technology for Educational Reform" (OERI, 1994)

• Greatly expanded information exchange capabilities
• New understanding about learning and understanding
• Curriculum organized as projects involving sustained and complex co-investigations.
• Changes in student and teacher roles in the classroom.
• Change in the conceptualization and practice of professional development.
• Accelerated curriculum and school restructuring to promote learning.

What will the community get out of technology changes?

• Parents and other community members will have access to classes, libraries, homework hotlines, school bulletin boards, community access channels and other resources to assist them in helping their children succeed in schools.
• Parents and teachers can communicate through personal electronic mail boxes and voice mail.

Benefits to Educational Practices:

"New technologies provide the potential for drawing the policymakers themselves, information resources, and all other components of the system 'toward a politics of collaboration.'"

"Computers and telecommunication systems are driving changes in how we manage educational organizations, how we teach, and how our students learn."

"Technology: Equity is addressed by an increase in state and local funding, school-business partnerships, development of tech-based community learning centers."

"Technology-rich classrooms are most successful when advanced technologies are linked with advanced teaching strategies; such as cooperative learning, thinking skills, guided inquiry, and thematic teaching."

In this section:

In the Toolkit: