| This invited feature article is based on a presentation made in the “Featured Technology Speakers” strand of the 49th Annual Convention of the International Reading Association, held May 2 to 6, 2004, in Reno, Nevada, USA. |
Technology Run Amok: The Top Ten TechnoBlunders
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| Abstract
This article identifies ten “TechnoBlunders” — assumptions and beliefs we have about technology that get us into trouble as teachers and teacher educators — and offers ideas for avoiding them. Aristotle said, “We cannot learn without pain.” The ten blunders described here come from the collective experience of myself and my colleagues, who acknowledge with gratitude that much of what we know about technology has come from painful mistakes. In the spirit of David Letterman, I share them in order from least to most notable. With each description, I include stories from teachers, research, and ideas. |
The Top Ten
10. Assuming Equipment Will Work |
TechnoBlunder #10: Assuming That the Equipment Will Work
Over the past 20 years, schools have spent millions of dollars to equip themselves with the latest technologies (Barnett, 2001, online abstract). Technology is indeed the most impressive development of our age, and each of us, in our own way, is captivated by it. But the equipment does not always do what we want it to do. Here are a few stories. See if you can relate.
Two Teachers’ Story
Mimi, a third-grade teacher, and Cheri, her student teacher, have a wonderful lesson planned that combines reading and science: Once they have finished reading William Steig’s 1986 book Brave Irene, the children will visit “Blizzard Attack” on the WeatherEye website to do research on storms like the one Irene encounters in the story. Students are to work in pairs to find information to record on their worksheets that will then be used to create a “Winter Survival Guide.”
Mimi has a wireless lab of 15 portable computers in her classroom that is shared between the two third-grade teachers in the school. Every student pair has access to a computer. Mimi and Cheri load the website from the district’s server to each computer and check and recheck the machines. Half of them are not working: Some are frozen, and some will not access the website (Wepner, Tao, & Ziomek, 2003b).
A Student Teacher’s Story
A student teacher has a lesson planned for her first-grade students in which they will go to the Public Broadcast System (PBS) Clifford the Big Red Dog website to listen to a Clifford story read aloud. The children will then complete a teacher-made worksheet on word-recognition skills. But when she tries to access the website from 15 different portable computers, it will not appear. To complicate matters, she has her university supervisor and another university representative observing her because they have heard about her creative use of websites with first graders.
My Own Story
On one occasion, I was at home writing a grant application at a feverish pace, only to have my machine freeze. I couldn’t call anyone because it was the middle of the night, so I have to stop working. On another occasion, when I was getting ready to go on vacation, I found out about an emergency at work. I needed to e-mail committee members about a meeting right away, and my computer went dead — totally dead. The summer 2003 incarnation of a widespread worm had hit my computer. The hardware company’s technical support team offered me the equivalent of “take two aspirins and call in the morning” by saying, “Go find a technician and call us back in a few hours when you have your data saved.”
From disastrous experiences with losing personal word-processing files to problems ub using websites for instructional purposes, we all have our technology war stories that make us not know whether to laugh or cry. So what to do?
Ideas for Handling Equipment Issues
TechnoBlunder #9: Assuming That Technical Assistance Is on Its Way
Like automobile maintenance, we usually don’t think about technical support until something goes wrong. But we need to ask what we should expect of ourselves as technology users, and what should be expected of technical assistance. Here are two stories to highlight the problems we encounter.
A Reading Specialist’s Story
Kathy had found the perfect software package to help one student with word recognition and reading comprehension skills. After 45 minutes, when she had helped the student reach the last section of the unit, the computer froze. None of the work had been saved, and the technical assistant was away on a two-week break.
A Teacher’s Story
John, a fourth-grade teacher, spent the better part of an evening preparing a lesson that included visiting a website about the U.S. presidential election. The next day at school, he could not access the Internet. Another teacher, who served as the technical person for the school, was on a field trip with his own class.
Of course, the ideal is a 24-hour hotline staffed by an even-tempered person who can solve problems immediately over the telephone or dispatch a trained technician to come to your location. The next best thing is an 18-hour hotline with the same features. Technical assistants themselves are frustrated by their inability to respond to all requests. But panicking is not the answer. Ken, a technology learning specialist I know, suggested to me that we teachers should think of hardware and software problems as opportunities to model for students how to get out of difficult situations.
Think of the following questions as a “Troubleshooter’s Survival Kit.” If we ask ourselves these questions before the day or lesson begins, we might have a shot at fixing problems ourselves or making sure we know in advance where help can be found.
These questions are basic enough to determine whether all systems are ready for a lesson’s implementation. Those more technologically savvy will be more sympathetic to our cries for help if they know that we have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to survive on our own.
If you are fortunate enough to have a techy pal — in other words, someone you can turn to in technology distress — you have built-in security for solving problems quickly. But if you do not, try to create a network or system in your professional community that will provide consistently reliable assistance. For instance, a middle school principal with a vested interest in teachers’ use of technology set up peer mentoring groups that paired those with limited technology skills and those who were more highly adept. The “mentees” rely on the mentors for all types of technical assistance and believe that this relationship has enabled them to take more risks with the equipment (Rudnesky, 2004). But now on to TechnoBlunder #8.
TechnoBlunder #8: Taking for Granted That There Is Financial, Administrative, and Peer Support
This TechnoBlunder comes from research that three of us conducted to determine what it takes to integrate technology into our teaching (Wepner, Tao, & Ziomek, 2003b). Tao, who is the most technologically proficient among us, was teaching at his institution. He assumed that, as a trailblazer with technology, his efforts would be recognized and celebrated, but it turned out that he did not have support. His experiences prompted us to hypothesize that, for integrating technology in school or university classrooms, context is just as important as one’s skills or willingness to make changes. We need to assess the level and type of nontechnical support that we have so that we know how far we can go with technology. As one teacher said, “They want us to have children trained in technology, yet administrators are not willing to fund it.”
I have seen one school run the gamut from one classroom with a single computer and an unworkable projection device to a state-of-the-art lab equipped with portable computers on a wireless network. In this latter setting, every child or pair of children has a computer, with four adults (teacher, student teacher, reading specialist, and parent) available to offer assistance with Internet-based lessons. Which teacher — the one in the ill-equipped classroom or the one in the lab — is going to be more inclined to use technology?
Consider the following as a checklist when rallying support needed for technology acquisition and implementation:
Even with the right equipment, sufficient technical assistance, and administrative and peer support, we still have to have a discerning eye for the software and websites that we use. Which leads us to TechnoBlunder #7....
TechnoBlunder #7: Believing That Software Publishers Know What They Are Talking About
Gardner (1991) wrote, “My own view is that a well-trained and effective teacher is still preferable to the most advanced technology, and that even excellent hardware and software are to little avail in the absence of appropriate curricula, pedagogy, and assessment” (p. 223). Technology should support and enrich what is taught and assessed. The most embarrassing mistake I made in this regard occurred 15 years ago. I was working in an urban school with eighth graders who challenged my skills. I had one software package intended to help them pass a statewide test, but many of them could not read the passages it required. I would count the minutes until class ended. I then stumbled onto an action-filled, arcade-like word-recognition package in which the students were to compete to shoot down words with specific word patterns. They could not get enough of it, and I used it over and over to keep them engaged. It was clearly “edutainment.”
Fastforward 15 years. I did a study with a graduate student on the use of graphics in literacy software packages. While there is research to support the claim that computer graphics contribute to students’ content area learning (Baskin, 1997; Card, Mackinlay & Shneiderman, 1999; Larkin & Simon, 1987; Zimmerman & Cunningham, 1991), we did not find any significant research to support the usefulness of graphics for literacy learning. Given the heavy use of graphics and edutainment in software that purports to promote early literacy learning, we thought that we should study how computer graphics function in relation to text. We found that many software packages have graphics that are what Tao (1998) describes as irrelevant. In other words, these graphics have no real connection to the text and do not aid comprehension, but they can enhance the visual value of the screen. The software package that I had used with my eighth graders used irrelevant graphics because they had no relation to the words the students were supposed to read.
How graphics are used to communicate text is just one of many issues related to the value of software for students. Publishers need to make claims about the value of their products; otherwise, they won’t sell. But we need to study software in relation to our students’ needs. Who designed or wrote it? What is the background, theoretical framework, and experience of the authors? What is the purpose of the software, and does the purpose fit my students’ needs? We also need to study the technical aspects of the software. What features does the program have to engage the students? How clear are the directions? Can we control the pace of the program? Does the program track performance? Are there teacher option controls? Is the program user friendly?
Even if the technical design works in the publisher’s testing lab, it might not necessarily work with students. One teacher noted, “I never quite figured out how to get into the program” — the sign-in procedure was harder to figure out than the content of the program itself. Another teacher found that the commands for printing in a writing program for young children were so complicated that they never could get their products to print. Ease of navigation — from sign-in to printing — is critical for success with any software program.
Even if we use software evaluation forms to determine the value of the software or websites that provide information about the software, we cannot depend on them as much as on firsthand observation with students. Others critique from their own set of experiences, which may or may not apply to our own situations. Some of the same issues that we find with software apply to websites, which leads to TechnoBlunder #6....
TechnoBlunder #6: Using Websites That Are Too Difficult or Are Painfully Boring
This TechnoBlunder comes from observations of students working with websites that present basically text on a screen. These sites, with paragraphs of continuous text and inanimate graphics, often are informative, but they lack features such as controlled vocabulary, definitions, animated explanations, large print, and pacing that enable young children to process the text content. While such websites offer access to information that ordinarily would not be available in the classroom, students nevertheless have difficulty attending to the task of reading that information.
Stories From the Field
There is nothing like a good website for sustaining students’ interest. Mary found the Starfall website, a free service that supports children’s learning to read with interactive books and rhyming word-family games that teach phonemic awareness, comprehension, vocabulary building, and spelling skills. Her third graders used the site when they tutored kindergartners. Kelly found The Seven Continents, where her first graders could take a virtual tour of the world. Nicole and her students celebrated Dr. Seuss at Suessville. This website highlighted things she had discussed with her students during their study of his works.
If we want to use websites effectively in our classrooms, there are several initial steps to keep in mind:
Even if the website is appropriate, current, and high quality, it might not be worth the extra work that using websites can entail. Which leads to TechnoBlunder #5....
TechnoBlunder #5: Developing Website Assignments That Are No Better Than Traditional Assignments
Jesse, a fourth grader, is supposed to be writing a report on President George W. Bush using information at the White House website. He is copying the text verbatim, without any real understanding of what he is reading or writing. It is no different from the plagiarism perpetuated in traditional topical research when students are asked to “find all you can about [name of topic], and report on it” (Balajthy, 2000; McKenzie, 1998). Books and other print sources, like websites, are often too difficult for students to process, so some students end up copying.
Balajthy (2000) believes that good use of websites depends on the assignments and questions, and the age appropriateness of such assignments. It involves knowing what the students are developmentally ready to handle, and understanding the level of teacher guidance needed to help students feel successful. Although we cannot control the website’s readability, and sites are not controlled for vocabulary the way published books are, we still can help students feel successful through our assignments. The following scenarios highlight how this can be accomplished.
Examples From Kelly
Kelly developed a Web-based author study on Kevin Henkes. She first read his 2000 book Wemberly Worried to her students, and then she had them go to the author’s website, where they were to look for answers to questions about his life. She created a reporter’s clipboard for each student that contained index cards on which to note details about book titles, author biography, other works, and interesting information. Student pairs worked together with the website to research these four areas.
Although many of the students could not read all the information at the site, they were able to help each other find material for each category. Kelly used three planning and organizational strategies that were helpful for her third graders:
On another occasion, Kelly developed a Web-based reading and science lesson. She had students read Mary Stolz’s 1998 Storm in the Night as a springboard to a lesson on thunderstorms. She used students’ responses from an initial exercise to develop questions for students to research at ThinkQuest’s Weather Gone Wild. Students worked in pairs to find answers to the questions that they were to note in their own teacher-made reporter folders, which again included index cards. As a follow-up, Kelly had a written worksheet for students to complete that was related to their research. Although the website is somewhat encyclopedic and has very few graphics, Kelly made sure that her students had a purpose for reading and had their own “reporter notebooks” to motivate them to do the work.
While Kelly created her own Web-based lessons so they would be tailored to her reading anthology and curriculum standards, there are ready-made lessons and WebQuests for students to use for research. Dodge (1995) defines a WebQuest as “an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet” (p. 10). Dodge’s own WebQuest site, along with Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators, provide numerous examples of or links to WebQuests for different grade levels and subjects.
There are a number of issues to consider when developing a website assignment:
Much has been written about the influence of the Internet on instruction (see, e.g., Karchmer, 2001, online document; Leu, 2000), yet teachers need to discover for themselves that it is worth the time to have a Web-based lesson ready for the students. This brings us to TechnoBlunder #4.
TechnoBlunder #4: Thinking That You Can Create a Technology Lesson on “The Morning Of”
According to one student teacher, it “takes twice as long — if not more than that — to create lesson plans when using technology. Not only do you have to create the lesson plan for using technology, but chances are your technology is going to fail, and you have to have a back-up lesson plan.” Another student teacher said, “Preparing for Internet lessons takes a lot longer than preparing for traditional lessons. I spent two hours looking at websites and an hour testing the computers.”
On the other hand, long-time teacher Linda Lamberston can whip up a lesson fairly quickly because of her years of experience with computers (personal communication, July 10, 2003). She finds sites that work with her unit, and then develops questions to help guide students through them. What matters to her is the purpose for the assignment, ways to get students to think about the information critically, and a match between the text, the questions, and the students.
I had the opportunity to observe a novice teacher use Kidspiration, a software package used for organizing information visually and expressing ideas. While she took the program home to practice with it, she did not really prepare ways to incorporate the content of her lesson with this application. She thought that she could prepare the actual lesson the morning before she was going to use it. She found out too late that she simply could not prepare quickly enough, and ended up getting herself very confused in front of her students.
It really depends on how one defines “the morning of,” how experienced a teacher is with integrating technology, and how complex the lesson is. A healthy dose of self-analysis of your skills, goals, and context contributes to an honest assessment of the additional time you will need to create lessons that make good use of technology. Cheri, mentioned in one of the stories in TechnoBlunder #10, is a veteran with technology, yet a novice with integrating it into the classroom. She knew that she would have to set aside more than a single morning to develop the following lesson, no matter how long the morning is.
Another Story From Cheri
Cheri developed a Web-based lesson with a website about the author and illustrator Jerry Pinkney. After students read Jerry Pinkney: Achiever of Dreams from their class reading anthology, they participated in an illustrator study by answering research questions that Cheri had created on a worksheet (e.g., What or who made Jerry Pinkney want to become an artist? Name three awards that Jerry Pinkney has won for his illustrations of children’s books.). As Cheri explained, this lesson took time because of the need to find the website, determine how to connect the information from the site to what students needed to learn, prepare an appropriate worksheet assignment, prepare the computers with the downloaded site, and organize the students into workable pairs.
In a nutshell, a technology lesson requires us to
Based on my own experience and my observations of other teachers, I offer these suggestions to help you handle the workload:
Even with all this planning, students’ ability to work effectively with technology is not always obvious, which leads to TechnoBlunder #3.
TechnoBlunder #3: Assuming That Students Are Able to Do What You Want Them to Do
Students from elementary school to graduate school challenge their teachers because of the wide-ranging skills that they bring to lessons that use technology. Students’ technology skills vary from those who have never touched a computer to those who work with them daily on a high level. When we consider both the technology skill continuum together with the content achievement and aptitude continuum, we are confronted with additional assessment and instructional responsibilities that make it that much more difficult to succeed. Here are two examples of what teachers observed while using technology in their teaching.
Observation From a Sixth-Grade Teacher
Joan Pearlman (personal communication, May 10, 2003), a sixth-grade language arts teacher in a private school, has students do literature response journals regularly. Because of an infusion of technology in the school, the students now have computers to use when they respond to buddies about the books they read. She also has graduate students from a literacy course involved through e-mail to help raise her students’ level of response to the books that they read. While she has observed that the quantity of writing and quality of expression have improved, she has found that students’ writing mechanics have suffered. She has also found that e-mail discourse promotes abbreviations, colloquialisms, and codes. She is spending much more time correcting students’ grammar and spelling, and is in the process of developing a system for helping students self-monitor their use of standard English.
Observation of a Third-Grade Teacher
One teacher tried having her third-graders write math stories on the computer, with the intent of giving them practice adding numbers with double digits. They first wrote a math story with paper and pencil, in which they described purchasing two or more items from a store. Students then wrote their story on the computer, and exchanged it with another student to complete by calculating how much money was spent. While it seems that this would be a useful assignment, the students’ keyboarding abilities were so varied that some could not get through it, delaying other students who were quick to finish. Within 20 minutes, the teacher had a bit of chaos on her hands. She quickly realized that she needed to have different pairing strategies and different types of assignments for different levels of proficiency.
Until a technology lesson is tried, it is difficult to determine what students will be able to do — or not do. Subscribing to checklists and making provisions for every imaginable technical issue still does not prepare us for students’ responses. The best we can do is forge ahead without assuming we know what will happen, and use the following recommendations as an additional defense against this TechnoBlunder.
Thinking about ways to make provisions for students leads to TechnoBlunder #2.
TechnoBlunder #2: Believing That Teaching With Technology Is Easier Than Teaching Without It
To demonstrate this TechnoBlunder, I share with you a few incidents from my university’s Summer Reading Camp. This camp provides a clinical setting for practicum for graduate students in the reading specialist certification program, along with an opportunity for struggling readers in grades 2 to 5 to participate in a summer camp to develop reading and writing skills. Elaine Marker (personal communication, September 20, 2003), former director of the camp, decided to use technology with students while studying the usefulness of the software program Balanced Literacy, part of IntelliTools Reading from the IntelliTools software company. She set up experimental and control groups, trained the teachers, prepared the parents, and oriented the campers. She worked closely with IntelliTools to get the software, and with the university’s technology coordinator to have access to the lab.
Elaine assumed that the computers in the lab would work the first day because she had checked that the hardware was working the day before. But when she tried to run the program the first day, all the computers froze because the processing speed was not high enough for the software. She had not checked to make sure that the software actually ran on the hardware. On the day of the lesson, she had to scramble to find enough computers with higher processing speeds to get the children through the technology sessions.
The lab did have a printer that was networked to the computers. Unfortunately, this, too, did not always work as expected. One of the graduate students kept trying to send a document to print, but she didn’t see anything come out of the printer. She did this about 50 times, and still nothing printed. By the time she sought help, she had 193 documents queued to print at a different printer outside the lab, with an estimated wait time of 12 hours. Elaine had to sit there and delete everything in the queue.
Once this printing problem was resolved, another surfaced. The Intellitools Reading: Balanced Literacy program keeps track of students’ progress, and progress reports can be generated. But Elaine simply could not figure out how to get the computer to print the reports, and the university’s technology coordinator was out of town. The graduate students had to copy from the screen all the data for their students.
In every incident, Elaine found that the technology was resulting in more work for her, rather than less. It should be noted, though, that this was her first time using the software, and she and her graduate students made novice-user blunders that obviously will not be repeated. Teachers who integrate technology successfully into daily classroom practice have three characteristics: will (motives and positive attitudes), skill (ability to use software applications), and tools (access to hardware and software systems) (Christensen & Knezek, 2001). Particularly important is the will to make a commitment to meeting the challenges of teaching with technology. In a recent study of three first-year teachers’ use of technology, the researchers wanted to involve only those who were truly interested in technology because they knew that would offer the best opportunity to observe effective literacy-technology integration (Watts-Taffe, Gwinn, Johnson, & Horn, 2003).
Observations of and reflections shared by teachers and teacher educators lead to the assertion that, in order for teachers to use technology, their responsibilities must shift considerably. They need to devote more time to their professional development to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills. They must spend more time planning and organizing for instruction and arranging for the availability and usefulness of equipment. They also need to realize and accept that, even as veteran teachers, they may be humbled by their lack of technology proficiency (Wepner & Tao, 2002).
As teachers evolve into using technology with ease and confidence, it actually becomes easier for them to individualize instruction, manipulate data and information, and promote communication and creativity. To help with this transformation, certain steps can be taken:
But even if this and every other of the aforementioned TechnoBlunders are addressed, consideration must still be given to TechnoBlunder #1.
TechnoBlunder #1: Living Life Without “Plan B”
TechnoBlunder #8 described how Tao learned about the necessity of having a “Plan B” when he discovered, after devoting enormous time to developing his syllabus for a technology-enriched reading and language arts methods course, that his university would offer no technology support. He could not use the only computer lab because lab assistance was not available. He had to secure a mobile computer set, which meant that he could only demonstrate the CD-ROMs for his software collection or take all students to the same websites. He had to set up individual conferences and establish a peer support system so that students could acquire the needed information to complete their projects (Wepner, Tao, & Ziomek, 2003a).
We need to be prepared for things not to work as expected. As two teachers said, “Half the time the laptops aren’t charged or half way through the lesson they die. Sometimes we just didn’t have enough mice for the laptops. The projector didn’t work for a couple of lessons. So if you’re going to infuse it into your classroom, you need to get good technology — and keep your fingers crossed. You definitely have to have a back-up plan because there is a 50-50 chance that something is not going to work.”
I offer the following options when technology fails and there’s no Plan B:
Whether the failure results because of the lesson itself, the hardware, the students, or our own lack of skill, it is important to be prepared with an alternative plan. This does not mean that for every lesson, there has to be a second “Plan B” lesson. Rather, there should be one or two lessons stashed in the drawer or briefcase that can be pulled out in the event of an emergency. They are the emergency number to dial during technology integration.
Conclusion
A few years ago, I was in Tallinn, Estonia, where I saw a huge sign across the main street in the heart of the city that quoted Joseph Stalin: “No people, no problems.” Now, as then, I appreciate that while we create challenges for others at both the micro and macro levels, we are here to stay. We could rephrase Stalin’s idea as “No technology, no technology problems,” but while I recognize that technology triggers problems, we also must acknowledge that we cannot survive without it in our modern society. Although not necessarily easily applied to the classroom, technology ultimately makes us better teachers because it improves our ability to tailor instruction and expose students to new information and communication tools. Technology also motivates students, leading to gains in time on task and achievement (Fogarty, 1998; Follansbee, Hughes, Pisha, & Stahl, 1997; Hyland, 1998, online document; Kirkpatrick & Cuban, 1998, online document; “Study Shows Technology-Achievement Link,” 1997).
As we grapple with technology’s ubiquity and our need to capitalize on its versatility, we can anticipate that as soon as we figure out how to avoid one TechnoBlunder, we will find ourselves facing a new one that is even more exasperating. We should reassure ourselves that pragmatically, and consistent with Dewey’s (1916, online document; 1923, online document; 1938) philosophy of “learning by doing,” the more blunders we make, the more we will understand all that we can and cannot do with technology.
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About the Author
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Shelley Wepner is a professor of education, director of the Center for Education, and associate dean of Human Service Professions at Widener University, Chester, Pennsylvania, USA (e-mail). She specializes in the use of technology for literacy development and teacher education, and leadership qualities of education deans and reading specialists. She is currently studying the impact of a model for integrating technology in teacher education and elementary education classrooms. Her most recent book publications include the third edition of The Administration and Supervision of Reading Programs (Teachers College Press, 2002) and Linking Literacy and Technology: A Guide for K-8 Classrooms (2000, International Reading Association), and she has authored or coauthored three award-winning software packages. |
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Citation: Wepner, S.B. (2004, May/June). Technology run amok: The top ten TechnoBlunders. Reading Online, 7(6). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=wepner2/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted May 2004
© 2004 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232