Reflection 5: Photo Sharing and Chapter 3

My Photobucket!

Providing teachers and students with 24/7 access to laptops, curriculum materials, and wireless internet service is a project that seeks to innovate the instructional practice in the classroom. The findings show that it has had a minimal effect in the manner in which instruction was presented in the classroom by the teachers.

There are three factors that influenced the project would have little impact on instructional practice: the teacher resistance to change, the poor instructional quality of the media software, and failure to provide teachers with adequate guidance on how to integrate the new media into their instructional practices.

The teacher resistance to change, especially top-down change, may be one of the main reasons why the project did not achieve the expected innovations. The project was designed by the school administration and the teachers had very little participation or input. All the important decisions of the project were made by the administration. Out of the four teachers only one believed in the project and was willing to use all the tools provided. Teacher’s interests and believes are essential to success in teaching and learning.

The second factor is the poor instructional quality of the media software used in the project. This software was mostly memorizing, boring exercises and was not any challenging for the students. All the materials used basically verbal and visual symbols only which did not allow much interaction to the students.

The third factor was the failure to provide teachers with adequate guidance on how to integrate the new media into their instructional practices. There was not any training for the use of this technology provided to the teacher before or during the project. Professional development is very important for the use and management of innovations in education. It can make the difference.

There are some strategies that may have helped this project to success in improving the instructional practice. The first thing is that for any plan to be successful, you have to be motivated and convinced that it works. The administration had to make teachers and students believe that this was a good plan and that those technologies were needed for they improve in their teaching and learning. Everyone involved on it had to be empowered. Another things that may have helped is that teachers had to be trained on how using effectively all these tools. This could have been done in workshops and practice before beginning the project and give support to the teachers during it. Also the project needed to be evaluated by the administration, teachers, and students often in order to see if it was working and how to improve what was not working