Continuing the series of interviews with technology directors and integration specialists, who give their "state of the union," and their views on education technology in the future.
Fred Bartels, Technology Coordinator at Rye Country Day School“Today, there’s a variety of tools: some are very intuitive and require little training—but in most cases, especially where faculty are going to be using the tools with their students—they want to be very comfortable with them, so it’s very helpful to have someone to be with them using the tool when they are first in a classroom situation. Our online training resource comes in as a place where we can refer people when we’re pretty sure they can go find information in a few minutes quickly and easily by themselves.”
“It’s hard to predict the future! We see stuff moving increasingly to the cloud, whether that’s essentially moving from Microsoft Office to Google Apps, or proprietary-hosted email to Google Mail. I don’t see that trend slowing down because the economics of it are so compelling. Ten years from now, people will be using mostly web-based apps and they’ll focus much less on the mechanics of the operating systems and more on the task. To be viable going forward, we’ll need to be much more sophisticated in understanding student learning and their increasing use of handhelds, tablets and Facebook. That’s where they want to get their information so it’s important we provide it to them through those portals. And we’ll need to get teachers to what they need to know very quickly.”
P.D. Tips courtesy of Atomic Learning
