What makes teachers adopt and use technology?

What makes teachers adopt and use technology? 

Since I began this academic journey, I have sought to find an answer to this question. I suppose this interest really started for me because of a divergence in my own life. Both my parents were phenomenal K-12 teachers, but with very different approaches.

I had to throw in another picture of my little guy (Ryjker) in the middle.

My father was excited about technology and tried to find ways to use it in his teaching experiences, but my mother was never very excited about it. As a new teacher, I was excited by all the possibilities of integrating technology into the classroom: perhaps one of my most memorable classroom experiences was when my 1^st grade students created a weather forecast video using their own data and powerpoints – 1^st graders! Through all of my interactions with K-12 teachers, I continued to find this chasm between two types of teachers – those that enjoyed using technology and those that did not. I could not understand why certain teachers saw the value in technology and chose to adopt it – what makes them adopt technology?

My research impacts the field of teacher education by investigating ways to support teachers’ use technology to enhance teaching and learning in a variety of pedagogical approaches. Teachers’ values are rarely included in conversations on best educational technology practices. My aim is to provide teachers with opportunities to provide input into these conversations and the decisions resulting from those conversations. Based on these new ideas, professional development programs can be designed to incorporate technology uses that align with teachers’ value beliefs, as well as strategies that align with teachers’ existing pedagogical processes in the classroom. These efforts may impact the transfer of technology into teaching and learning, making adoption more successful.

Technology integration is any technology tool used by an educator or student to impact teaching or learning. I do not assign levels of use, but focus on helping teachers make technology decisions that will enhance their teaching or learning. Specifically, there are two particular constructs that guide my scholarly work: experiences (how should this knowledge be taught to teachers) and topics (what knowledge is necessary for teachers to integrate technology). I’d like to discuss the experiences in this first blog entry.

Experiences

How can we encourage teachers to use technology? There have been a myriad of publications discussing the barriers to teachers’ adoption of technology (e.g., lack of resources, lack of knowledge). However, there are instances where teachers have been successful in technology integration, regardless of barriers (Ertmer, Ottenbreit-Leftwich, Sadik, Sendurur, Sendurur, 2012). I was involved in four separate research studies that investigated the factors that influenced teachers to use technology. From these studies, I discovered the importance of observing the context of each teacher’s environment. Results from the first study (Ertmer, Glazewski, Jones, Ottenbreit-Leftwich, Goktas, Collins, & Kocaman, 2009) suggested that although successful technology-enhanced problem-based learning (PBL) teachers faced multiple challenges when implementing PBL, they created and adapted effective strategies (e.g., starting small, providing greater structure with access to lists of relevant web resources) to mitigate obstacles typically encountered by other teachers. The other two studies specifically investigated the internal and external factors that influence teachers’ decisions to adopt and implement technology in two different contexts: one invested teachers within the context of a school district reform initiative, the other investigated individual teachers who received awards for their use of technology.

The contextual study within a school district reform initiative (Richardson, Ertmer, Aagard, Ottenbreit, & Yang, 2007) found factors that are both internal (motivators) and external (professional development activities) to the teacher influence teachers’ decisions to adopt and implement initiative-promoted strategies. The award-winning teachers study (Ertmer, Ottenbreit-Leftwich, & York, 2006) further investigated how influential internal and external factors were to teachers regarding their uses of technology. We found that, overall, internal factors tended to be more influential than external factors. Specifically, internal factors such as inner drive, personal beliefs, commitment, confidence, and previous success were rated as the most influential factors for the 25 award-winning teachers.

To follow this study, I focused on more closely examining the factors that influenced expert technology-using teachers to use technology (Ottenbreit-Leftwich & Glazewski, in preparation). Although many studies have investigated the development of teachers’ technology growth within a specific program, few have investigated how teachers naturally build this expertise. Therefore, I investigated the developmental process, and the factors that influenced the development, of eight award-winning teachers’ technology expertise. Based on these results, I created a model that includes four sets of experiences that emerged as critical to motivating the teachers to pursue more technology integration: Technology in Context (developing interest | building basic technology skills); Implementation in the Classroom (motivated by students | stakeholders); Advancing Technology Integration Knowledge (self-initiating learning | implementing, revising, reflecting); and Sharing with Others (leadership | teaching teachers technology).

This knowledge helped me consider the different factors to include in professional development experiences for inservice teachers in order to help them achieve technology expertise. However, as I was teaching preservice teachers how to use technology, I also was curious as to which experiences would best prepare preservice teachers to use technology in their future classrooms. Consequently, I engaged in a literature review to investigate how programs prepared preservice teachers to use technology (Ottenbreit-Leftwich, Glazewski, & Newby, 2010). I reviewed articles that discussed preservice technology integration experiences. Each experience had a unique approach to educating teachers on technology use. I established a conceptual guide for how to design technology experiences for preservice teachers. The guide assists teacher educators in selecting the most appropriate experiences in order to achieve the specific intended goals of the faculty member. The conceptual guide addresses three main elements of technology experiences: approaches (information delivery, hands-on activities, practice in the field, observation or modeling, authentic experiences, and reflection), technology content goals (e.g., NETS-T standards), and the broader context (e.g., stand-alone course, full implementation). Teacher education faculty can use this guide to select the most appropriate learning experiences to best prepare preservice teachers to use technology in their future classrooms.

Although this helped me conceptualize how to design courses and the various goals that existed, there still seemed to be a disconnect between the experiences inservice teachers found to be influential and those experiences in which preservice teachers engaged. I was a co-lead on a large Department of Education contract task through the Office of Educational Technology: Leveraging Technology to Keep America Competitive. Thomas Brush and I are leading a research team to collect national data regarding how preservice teachers are prepared to use technology, comparing this with how inservice teachers were prepared to use technology. The results showed that the most common requirement for preservice teachers is an educational technology course (80%), although most inservice teachers did not find this type of experience extremely valuable (Ottenbreit-Leftwich, Brush, Strycker, Groseth, Roman, Abaci, van Leusen, Shin, & Easterling, 2012). Instead, inservice teachers reported that field experiences and methods courses were typically the most valuable; these experiences were not required by a majority of teacher education programs.

Overall, I believe that the investigation of teacher technology adoption still needs to be conducted from the ground floor, up. In other words, similar to the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow long-term research conducted several decades ago (Sandholtz, Ringstaff, & Dwyer, 1997), we need to investigate teachers’ evolutionary process through technology adoption. For my future research projects, I would like to investigate in long-term studies how teachers (particularly those that do not see the benefit in technology to begin with) adopt technology, as well as the barriers and enablers that impact this process.

Sandholtz, J.,  Ringstaff, C., & Dwyer, D. (1997). Teaching with technology: Creating student-centered classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.