INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

The teacher provides rich environments, experiences, and activities for learning by incorporating opportunities for collaborative work, problem solving, authentic tasks, and shared knowledge and responsibility. In a collaborative classroom, the teacher must act as a guide-a complex and varied role that incorporates mediation, modeling and coaching. When mediating student learning, the teacher frequently adjusts the level of information and support based on student’s needs and helps students to link new information with prior knowledge, refine their problem-solving strategies and learn how to learn.

The potential of technology presents both the greatest opportunity and the greatest threat to schools and their leaders. Successful leaders are those who decide to focus and concentrate on how best to intersect technology with teaching and learning. There are few paradoxes faced by the technology leaders. These are: Technology can improve the interaction and dialogue between teachers and students, resulting in improved teaching and learning, but it can also isolate, marginalize and reduce effectiveness in the classroom next is technology can offer its power to all students, but it can also segregate and deny that power and lastly, technology can assist with engaging students in meaningful learning and promote higher-level thinking, but it can also mirror traditional instructional pedagogy.

I agree with the paradoxes the answers do not lie in the hardware and software of our computer labs and classrooms. They are not disguised in workshops and conferences, nor evident in our school and teacher preparation programs. The answers lie with the technology leaders and teachers who will make the choices for the future.  The choices is in our hands: Do we let technology ride us?





If an organization is to be a learning organization it must engage in critical self-inquiry at all levels. Given the imperatives of the post-modern, information age, a process for engaging in rational communicative inquiry is essential. Technology is driving this imperative and can promote its successful outcome. The much greater capability to share, store, present, and retrieve information presents us with the challenge of organizing a process of continuous improvement that can harness this data processing power to create knowledge to improve student performance.

To do this at the organizational level requires coordination of technological resources, development of a shared information system, and cultivation of human resources so that educators can become knowledge workers. That is our challenge as advocates of education. The feedback can play an important role in conquering this challenge by preventing us from simply going around in circles.




As the use of technology continues to improve and becomes more accessible for students and teachers, I believe and hope that schools will be transformed from isolated classrooms into vibrant learning communities. If technology can promote this, then surely technology matters.

As I have observed, I have a clearer picture of how students learn electronic information access skills and how I can improve my instruction using the technology.

The challenges are great; the possibilities are limitless. We have come to live the experience of how the Chinese people define crisis. The Chinese character means “opportunity” and crisis. It suggests that we are in a time of both opportunity and crisis.

The crisis we are facing is the crisis to public education as we struggle to maintain a system designed to educate our democratic nation. In conjuction with the advent of technology, we are observing a larger number of students, a greater inclusion of special needs students, more research and information about teaching and learning around which to process and shape practices, and a potential system based on accountability information systems.

The opportunity is that we are finally able to do what we believe all educators have wanted to do for so many years – create a science for teaching that does not ignore the art of teaching. We can finally bring all of the incredibly rich and artistic experiences teachers have developed to the fore, and so bring the wisdom of teaching to the larger education community. We can communicate with one another and connect to one another in ways that were either costly of our time and finances as possible. To meet the challenges posed by technology with the aim of improving student performance, we will need to follow a path of continuous growth and learning.

 




In order for the implementation of technology to be successful and effective, schools must be careful about external management or leadership. Yes, we sometimes need the help of experts from outside our immediate school environment, but often those experts are not familiar with the special needs of our school, therefore offering advice and council not particularly helpful to our needs. Some would say that in this case, the leader is really neglecting his or her responsibility to manage technology in such a way as to meet institutional goals and objectives.

One might reasonably ask, how can a person be the technology leader if he or she is not technologically competent or knowledgeable? I am not suggesting that leaders must avoid the use of technological experts from outside the school environment. The value of outside expertise and experience is not in question here. The core is this” A person as the technology leader must remain visible and involved in guiding the process of implementing technology, with teaching and learning as the driving force.

 




Identifying what direction we want ahead should be based on our organization’s needs and desires and focused on using our available resources – both financial and human: determining why we should head in that direction should be based on sound educational research; and determining how we will know when we get there requires the establishment of measurable goals and a continuous evaluation plan.

The leader should strive to integrate the technology plan into the school culture as much as possible. If technology is appropriately implemented, it is woven into the fabric of the school community and exists in harmony with all other aspects of the organization. Technology plans too separate distant from institutional goals and objectives make it difficult to identify the connection between technology and the teaching and learning goals it is designed to support.