Toward a New Model of High-Tech Schoolrooms

In the article, Toward a New Model of High-Tech Schoolrooms, author Royal Van Horn describes a differentiation between a high-tech school and a high-tech schoolroom. He believes the emphasis should be on building a classroom rich in technology providing students with valuable lessons by creative, diverse and relative means.

Although the article centers on the development of a high-tech schoolroom, there was one sentence in the article that stayed at the forefront of my thoughts throughout the read. Mr. Van Horn wrote, “Kids learn from teachers in classrooms.” This is a very personal statement and bears a great deal of responsibility for someone who wants to be a teacher. How will I provide my students with the necessary tools to be inspired to learn? How will I reach every student in my class with the growing number of learning styles and disabilities that need to be addressed? How will I stay current with teaching trends? How will I continue to keep my lesson plans fresh and creative? In this article about high-tech schoolrooms, he did not say, “Kids learn from technologically equipped schoolrooms.” However, it is with technological advances in the classroom where teachers can make an impact. It will be up to us, the teachers, to use every ounce of technology available, be it a reading or math program for a computer, a smartboard with interactive capabilities, a video camera or an assistive technology to reach all the students in the classroom.

I agree that technology needs to be an everyday part of a classroom regardless of the age group being taught. It’s a shame that technology appears to be underutilized at the elementary level. Van Horn writes about his observations, through the use of computer monitoring programs, that computer usage peaks during times of the day when the children have just a few minutes before lunch or while they wait for the end of their school day. This hardly seems like an appropriate use of integrating technology into the elementary classroom. (As a side note, I would like to state that this particular article was written in March of 2006. A lot can and has happened in the four years since the publication of this article, not just in technology but also with classroom curriculum. Even when my own children were in elementary school, they were taken to a computer lab once a week with a trained computer specialist, not the classroom teacher. Today, Plainfield middle school students are required to take a computer applications class and high school students are required to take another computer class as a requirement for graduation. I would imagine significant changes have been made in numerous school districts throughout the country.)

I believe most of us would agree that technology can be a true asset in the classroom but there is one area that Mr. Van Horn did not address. Who is going to pay for these high-tech classrooms? The technology that Mr. Van Horn writes of is above and beyond classroom computers. He makes mention of “a planetarium, a 360-degree immersion theater, and a high-definition television production lab.” I cannot even imagine the cost of such elaborate technology, and in this day where students are being billed to participate in extra-curricular activities and teachers are being laid off, can such extraordinary expenses be justified? We all want what is best for the children, but let’s face it: School budgets, state budgets and federal budgets simply do not provide the resources to offer our children the best.

Even though the expense issue was not addressed, Van Horn does comment on the status of teachers using technology. “Expecting every faculty member to schedule the lab and to know how to use it productively with students is simply unrealistic.” Unfortunately, I see the truth in this statement since I work with a teacher who still hand writes his tests and makes copies of that, instead of typing it into a word processing program. If this teacher is so resistant to something as simple as word processing, how would it be possible for his students to be inspired or encouraged to do a cinematographic vignette of the civil war or learn to stage a virtual protest, or to produce any other thought provoking, technologically creative assignments? After all, kids learn from teachers in classrooms.

Along these same lines, not only do the finances have to be available to properly train teachers in the varied uses of technology, we must also find a way to encourage those teachers with ten, twenty and even thirty years of teaching experience under their belts to embrace the use of technology in their classrooms. Van Horn says the mere existence of a few networked computers in a classroom and one on the teacher’s desk is not enough for teachers “to integrate these computers into their instructional day…and no amount of staff development will make it work.” It is imperative, in this day and age of technology and the direction in which business and employment opportunities are going to be based in technology, to incorporate the use of technology in the daily instruction of our students. A whole new dimension of learning will be available to students who are taught by innovative and tech-savvy teachers. We have to remember, kids learn from teachers in classrooms.

Last year I had the privilege of working with a student teacher for a couple of periods a day and having my daughter as a teaching assistant one period a day. When the student teacher found out that my daughter wanted to be a high school French teacher he offered her one piece of advice. He told her to take as many computer classes as her college career would allow. He explained, the more technology she gained, the more she was going to be able to give to her students. At the time, I saw his advice as nothing more than an opinion of a young 22-year old, eager to make his mark on the youth within our schools. But I saw this young man in action, using technology to teach several different grade levels of math to high school students with learning disabilities and he was amazing. Today, probably more so than ever, I am astounded by how much I learn from teachers in classrooms