Technology Advocacy: Becoming An Agent for Change at School

Teaching through technology is coming to a campus near you. Call it paperless practices to sustain our planet or even teaching to the 21st Century learner. The inevitability of change is here. Teachers are faced with students who learn in different modalities than we did when we were kids. Student look the same, smell the same, even eat the same, but have remarkably different abilities than we did as students--some of which we haven't even figured out yet. And we may not even know just what we don't know about digital learning. We do know that caring, savvy teachers are becoming agents of change on school campuses everywhere and attempting to update teaching methods from the 19th or 20th century ones we are trapped in.
To effectively influence technology decisions at any school, a teacher must first get involved in that dreaded black hole of free time --the schoolwide committee. You know where I'm going with this, to lead technology change, one must be on the technology committee; to tranform curriculum, one must put time on the curriculum development committee. But, beyond attending meetings, be a role model for other teachers so that your lessons, your implementation into practice ideas are talked about. Be willing to share what you develop to bring others along. No one on our campus is the guru of anything, but we all know which teachers have a handle on the technology resources available and wonder what they are doing with all that time they reserved in the computer lab throughout the year.
In completing the requirements for my M.S. in Integrating Technology in the Classroom, I have learned to identify emerging technologies with applications for the high school classroom. They will have advantages and downfalls and almost always replace a different technology as they are implemented. To be worth the time and energy required for implementation, they must provide learning value at the level my students operate. I have practiced convincing colleagues and administrators to take up the challenge of implementing digital tools in meaningful and routine ways that engage students in active learning. In order for technology to be truly transformative in the education for my students, it must be useable and practical while logically teaching or reinforcing core content. I have even written a grant proposal for funding innovative uses of digital teaching tools. I found out that grant committees want specifics of the number of learners and teachers involved so their grant dollars can stretch as far as possible.
Through it all, I have had to make adjustments to my efforts. Surfing the web can be time consuming and completely distracting. So many pre-made online lessons there for the taking can waste the time of a curious educator. There can be so many multimedia, interactive, real world examples that can cloud the simple realities of teaching to specific learner outcomes and prevent true understanding.