Integrating technology, how can you stimulate the teacher?

A basic assumption of using TPACK is that technology is really integrated in education. Teachers don’t use technology just for fun or as an add-on in their lessons, but use it as an important, integrated element together with the content and pedagogy. But how can you stimulate teachers to really integrate technology in their education? In this blog, I discuss my ideas about this. 

      I think integrating technology is a process. This process goes form knowing and experience technology and their uses by the teacher. After knowing it, they’ll have to believe in the opportunities. When they are willing to integrate technology, the skills are needed even as a context for trying it out. At the last, time is needed to getting used to it. In the following I describe these steps in more detail. 

      

      Knowing technology

I think that in the first place, teachers have to experience the use of technology by themselfs. Technology has to be concrete for them, and they’ll have to know how usefull it can be for their learning. Therefor, we put in our teacher development course an online learning environment. Hereby, teachers can experience the usefullness of this technology. Also, they’ll get a lot of technological examples in the workshop of what technologies you can use, and how you can use it. In the first day of the workshop, the teachers have to think about their use of technology and talk with other teachers about their use of it. Together, they can discuss how they can use technologies in a  better way. The reason for letting the teachers think and talk about the use of technology is that they’ll become aware of the possibilities of technology. When you want to integrate technology in your lessons, you have to think about technology as a normal way of teaching and you have to know the existence and uses of different technologies. Knowing technologies is the first prerequisite of the integration of them in your lessons.

 

      Believe in technology

After knowing technologies, teachers must be willing to integrate the technologies in their education. How can you stimulate this? I think that it’s important that teachers see and believe the opportunities of technologies for learning. When they think that learners learn more with the technology, they are willing to integrate them in their lessons. I think every teacher wants that their students learn the best, so when they believe that technology can help them, they will integrate them in their lessons.

            Being able to use technology

So, to stimulate teachers to integrate technology in their lessons, they have to know the technologies and to believe in the opportunities for learning. When these two factors are there, I think teachers are willing to really integrate technology in their education. But they need the skills to integrate them. And therefor they have to work with it, learn about it and try it out. They can do that on their own, but I thinks it’s more efficient and effective when they do that in teams. When a teacher is working in a teacher team, he or she can talk about things with other teachers, they can watch by eachother how they use technology, they’ll face difficulties not only by themselfs, but also by others and they’ll see good practices by others and by themselfs. By working in teacherteams, they have more experiences with the use of technology, so they can learn more about it. Evenso, they have people around them who can help with problems. Help to search for solutions. Two are knowing more than one, and five will know even more!

  

            Getting support

Beside of the teacher teams, I think it will be a great help when their is an expert who can help teachers with the use and integration of technology. An expert which is aware of which technologies can be used and of what is possible in the classroom. This expert can help teachers by showing them uses of technologies, but also by thinking of how to use them. Also, the expert can give guidelines of how to get the greatest effects out of technology and out of the teacher teams. Hereby, the expert can give the teachers the TPACK-model. This can be a great guideline to integrate technology in the education.

             On the long run

 Finally, to really integrate technology in the education, I thinks it is important to guide teachers on the long run. I think it won’t help teachers very much when they are stimulated one day to use technology. They have to get help and stimulation longe. Therefor, teacher teams have great opportunities. The teams are working together for longer time, and the expert can come across once in a time. On this way, teachers can’t forget the way of using technology easily. They are forced to think about it regulary. Thereby, at a certain moment, they don’t have to think explicitly about the use of technology, but they’ll use it as a normal element of their lessons. They will say: of course I use technology in my lessons, that’s just as important as the content or the pedagogy of my lessons!  

As I said, I think integrating technology is a process. In this process, teachers can be supported by an expert and by peers. By doing this carefully and getting the time for it, I think teachers can be stimulated to integrate technology with content and pedagogy in their learning practice.