Education Tech Needs

My latest task in CEP 812 was to survey my fellow staff members to determine the wants/needs within my district towards technology. You are welcome to see my survey at the following link. Or you are welcome to take the survey and add to my data.

My school is very low income and does not have a lot of technology. We have two computer labs in our middle school. I am not sure in our other schools. However, this seems to be a large problem in our school. In fact, it is a deterrent to try and create lessons that would need technology. Through my own personal feelings and opinions I had felt that most of the teachers do not have much experience with technology. (In fact, one time, a teacher came to my room upset because her computer did not turn on. She had only turned on her monitor.) Our staff is small, but I did get 22 responses. Of the 22 responses here are the percentages for each grade level:

As you can see, I received a proportional amount between the different schools in my district. One of the first questions I asked was how comfortable the teachers feel with technology. Here are my results. 1 is the lowest representing not at all, 3 representing average, and 5 represents excellent

You can see the majority ranges towards the level of 5. However, I do not believe that the majority of the teachers really understand what it truly means to understand using technology daily. When asked what technologies they use in their classroom including the categories laptops/ipads, smartboard, document cameras, social networking, classroom websites, google apps, stand alone resources, universally designed lessons and classroom management systems only one averaged above a 3. This category was classroom websites. So only classroom websites were used on a sometimes rank.

Overall, the staff that was surveyed would enjoy to have PD in the area of technology. Here is a visual representation of if they would choose to have PD in technology:

I only had one staff member that chose no in this question. A clear minority. In a free response question it asked what types of pd or technologies would the teachers like to learn about. Within this response the majority of teachers asked to learn about various technologies. It was not about ideas learned about in the CEP program such as creating websites, using social networking, StAIR, UDL lessons or various tips and tricks. It was straight forward such as "smartboards" or "ipads" and the integration of being able to use these more often to create smoother transitions and more effective lessons.

Overall, through the survey and my own personal reflections and observations it is clear to me that my staff is lacking in knowledge when it comes to technology. The staff is still very focused on the basics and could benefit from having lessons in the how to's from using various technologies. However, I truly believe the staff would benefit more from learning how to use technologies to show collaboration and creativity in projects. If this was used, the how to's would come along for the students. (This is definitely how I learned various programs such as Google App's in this program.)