15 Curriculum, Technology, and Teaching in Challenging Times
15 Curriculum, Technology, and Teaching in Challenging Times
“In a world where knowledge and information are abundant and so easily accessible, the roles of teachers and learners are transformed and blended. The walls of the classroom have been extended through new technologies and in this extended classroom roles must adapt.” –Grace Nyagah
Introduction
Technology has had a tremendous impact on the curriculum, particularly in the year when the pandemic struck, and nearly all schools went “online.”
Many teachers had a “crash course” in using technology, with mixed results. In the long term, the most effective use of technology requires thoughtful changes in how to teach. It is a combined effect of best teaching practices and sound technologies that lead to improvements in learning. Teachers have to discover in what ways technology is a tool that supports particular teaching or learning strategies that benefit their students.
Essential Questions
- How has teaching changed as a result of technology and the avalanche of new information?
- Why is digital citizenship an important dimension in online teaching?
- How might teachers stay in the classroom and also be involved in curriculum development?
- Why has the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation moved away from funding teacher performance initiatives to curriculum?
- What is needed to properly integrate educational technology in support of students academically?
A Journey with Technology
When my parents got married in 1929, my father had just graduated from college with a degree in chemical engineering, my mother had just finished her freshman year studying dietetics. The stock market crash that August dashed their career plans, and they were glad to get teaching jobs in a small community on the Dolores River in western Colorado. My mother was just 19 years old, but her one year of college was enough to get a teaching certificate.
The most “high tech” invention in their lives, outside of their prized Model A car, was the camera that took their picture. In Gateway, Colorado, they taught the students in grades one through twelve in a two-room school. Daddy taught all the high schoolers and Mother taught the younger students, and between them, they taught all the subjects.
My husband and I followed in my parents’ footsteps when we got our first teaching jobs, also on Colorado’s western slope. In my first-grade classroom in Montrose, I had access to a record player (for teaching music), a film strip projector for showing slide shows, and a mimeograph machine to duplicate work pages for the students. On special occasions, the first-grade teachers would get the classes together in a large room and show a 20-minute science movie or cartoon to the students using a 16-millimeter projector and a screen. It was a highlight for the kids because many did not own television sets or get to go to the movies.
A tech “glitch” sometimes arose when the film got stuck in the projector, and we teachers would watch in horror