ABC Week 4

For this week’s extra credit I found a journal article from the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. The title of this journal was “Teacher Technology Change: How Knowledge, Confidence, Beliefs, and Culture Intersect. This article basically goes through the four factors listed in the title, and talks about how each of these factors affects the teacher’s use of technology in the classroom. I really enjoyed reading how each of these factors affects teachers in different ways. There were two parts of the article that really caught my attention.

In this article, the authors say the use of technology in the classroom can be positively or negatively betrayed by other teachers. The authors use the term “peer pressure” and they say that some teachers will use, or might not use technology because of peer pressure. They suggest that experienced teachers that don’t see the value of using instructional technologies might influence new teachers not to use it. I had never thought of this before, but thinking back to when I first started teaching, I had a teacher that was sort of my mentor, and she didn’t know anything about technology, so she though it wasn’t important. I had heard in some of my classes that technology was a good thing, but this teacher seemed to make things work, so I followed what she did. Now I know this was not the way to do it. The authors did suggest that peer pressure could also be a positive thing, as it can motivate us to try new things we otherwise might not have tried.

The second part of the article I really agreed with was when the authors’ mentioned the importance of teachers being confident in their abilities. At first this sounded silly, but it is so true. There are so many teachers that think they just can’t do it, and that is not true. While I believe they cannot do it on their own, if these teachers are given the opportunity to learn, they just need to believe in themselves and try, instead of thinking “oh, it’s technology, which means I can’t do it.” It is the schools job to help support the teacher in this, and then it is the teacher’s job to make sure they believe in themselves.

Overall I thought this article had some great ideas about what is stopping, or helping the use of technology in schools. It brought up some ideas, like the importance of confidence that I simply hadn’t thought about before. I thought it talked about each factor, knowledge, confidence, beliefs, and culture, and gave good examples of how to overcome and solve some of the problems with each of these in schools.

Ertmer, P, & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, A. (2010). Teacher technology change: How knowledge, confidence, beliefs, and culture intersect. Journal of Reaserach on Technology in Education, 42(3), 255-284.