history of the field- week 6

Loading... Week 6 history of the field

If I assigned as one of the evaluators for the project, and my finding clearly indicate that the innovation had very little effect on the manner in which instruction was presented in the teachers’ classroom, I can describe some possible reasons for that. The first possible reason that may let the project had very little effect on the instructional practices employed by the teacher is “the teachers resistance to change.” For example, let’s think how difficulties can occur for the math teacher in this project. As we all know, mathematics is one of the most difficult course to explain. Teachers need to use colorful pens in order to explain some mathematical problems. Also, they need to write many kinds of mathematical symptoms, draw curves and so on. Those teachers will not found it easy to use the laptops instead of pens or chalk and boards to explain in class. Or even to evaluate their students work. Moreover, “the failure to provide teachers with adequate guidance as to how to integrate the new media into their instructional practices” can be a reason lets the project had very little effect on the teacher’s instructional practices. For instance, for the science teacher, using the computer is very helpful. There are a lot of pictures, videos, and another helpful features of using the computer in science education. However, if the teacher do not know how to address all these features and integrate them into his or her instructional practices, there will not be an effective role of using these computers. In addition, the last reason I would like to add here is “the cost associated with purchasing and maintaining the necessary media hardware”. For example, when the language art teacher wanted to use a microphone to record the students’ sounds, in order to improve their pronunciation, the quality was very poor. Or, even if the teacher wanted to use the headphones, for phonetics practices, the headphones were poor quality. So, the teacher cannot use these features, and using the laptops was not too helpful in this case.

In my opinion, there are two strategies that may help to solve the problems above. First, is to provide a required course in using instructional technology for the teachers. So, they can address using the computers, and integrate them into their instructional practices perfectly. The second strategy is to test all the laptops by an expert and devote a budget for the maintenance work of these laptops to solve any problems such as the poor quality.