Sunday, April 6, 2008

Perceptions of Technology

How do we change this:

To this:

When most of the staff at my school view technology the image that comes to mind is the first. My goal (and responsibility) is to transform their perception of technology to the latter.

I am in the enviable position of having a school based administrator who shares a similar vision of how technology to can be used as a tool to enhance learning.  While planning for the next school year she is trying to budget release time for team teaching involving technology and inquiry based learning.

In my mind the only significant barrier remaining is that our system is based on the "lock it down" mentality. Every step in a process presents the students with another barrier. The current deployment of technology does not allow the students to remember passwords for frequently visited websites, they can not choose their own start page, and it makes the desktop apps we want to use unusable (Picasa, Windows Movie Maker).

How can I persuade my school division's administrators that our network should look more like a Swiss Army knife than a series of hurdles?