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Essay on How Well are Pre-service Teachers
Prepared to use Technology?
Schools across the country continue to make great strides in providing access to technology for students, teachers, and administrators. In fact, the most recent figures from the “U.S. Department of Education indicate that nearly all schools 99 percent now have Internet access, with 87 percent of individual classrooms having access” (Means, 1994). However, there continues to be a divide between access to technology and the actual use of technology in our nation's classrooms. Much of the divide can be linked to teacher preparedness.
Today's classroom is very different from one10-15 years ago. Technology not only makes classroom instruction easier, it can also make it more difficult. Teachers are experiencing the Profiles of Learning and new Graduation Standards; technology is at the heart and soul, and pre-service teachers must be able to help their students meet these goals and standards. Inquiry and technology are at the foundation.
While surveys of technology coordinators by Market Data Retrieval indicate an “increase in the use of computers and the Internet by teachers 63 percent of schools reported that a majority of their teachers use the Internet for instruction nearly one quarter” (Campoy, 1992) of the same schools surveyed categorized a majority of their teachers as beginners when it comes to using technology. Teachers also rate themselves as inexperienced, with only one-third feeling well prepared or very well prepared to use computers or the Internet for instruction. Eighty-two percent of teachers cited a lack of release time for training as the greatest barrier to using computers or the Internet for instruction, a problem that has been pinpointed in several studies. As would be expected, teachers in general reported feeling more prepared to use technology as the number of hours of training increased.
These differences in teacher preparedness play out in the classroom in fairly significant ways........
