Technology at Ypsilanti High School: A Gap between Presence and Usage

Coming into Ypsilanti Community High School which I knew was a "high needs school," I assumed that their would be a lack of resources, especially technologically While this lack of resources definitely exists, there are actually  many technologies available within the walls of the school. For instance within my mentor teacher's classroom we have 18 Macintosh computers and a set of fifty graphing calculators for students to use within its walls. As far as the overall technology in the classroom there is a teacher laptop, a projector, an audio device for the projector, a dongle to hook up the teacher laptop to the projector, a DVD/VCR player. While technological equipment is requested by teachers for their classroom the summer before the school year, the lack of enough and of organized technological specialists prevents many of these requests from being handled, For instance, many of the teachers were not even  issued the laptops that the district provides them with until two weeks after the year began-so  teachers were not able to record grades online or submit attendance electronically. While the school does have internet, it only works for about an hour and not very well in the basement where the STEMM academy is located. Even though teachers have complained about the internet servers, there has not been any changes made.  For about a month the computers in the back of the classroom weren't working as well. This limited some of the different types of lessons and activities that we could do in our classroom. In fact, my mentor teacher hardly uses the technology that eventually became available. I began to wonder about some of the reasons, other than having an overbook tech specialist, that might have helped to make this true.

I figured that some of the discrepancy between having the technology and actually using it is due to a lack of comfort with using itf or teaching and learning. Even teachers who are using technology and report a high degree of comfort with technology probably tend to use it in fairly rigid ways that mostly cater to themselves and planning for their lessons since having students learn with technology brings about a variety of complications.  While students frequently do use computers in the classroom, use is often limited using them for Google searching and as a factual resources rather than as multimedia tools or digital content to design and create products Often, learning with technology is teacher-centered rather than student-centered since teaching with technology is not always offered to teachers as a course.

While many teachers still feel uncomfortable using technology in their teaching practice, it is also likely that teachers feel new technologies are unproven in the classroom. Though there has been a great deal of research on the efficacy of technology tools for teaching and learning, many of these studies may not translate well to the reality of the classroom. This also seems to be the case in my own school where when I asked about the technology specialist, the teachers there replied that young people like myself were the specialists. I found there to be some disconnect in this way of thinking since I am still a learning teacher-I may have a better grasp of using some technologies but it is difficult for me to know how to use they effectively in the classroom since I have not been in a classroom for long!