I love technology. I really do. Heck, I’m the one who told Ben Guest about twitter and del.icio.us. My daily life is infused with technology. I'm adrift without it. I was a charter subscriber to Wired in 1993.

But I find myself oddly resistant to its use in my classroom.

I prefer to think of "technology" as another tool I either have or don't have at my disposal to complement the actual teaching I want to do. If I'm a good teacher, the technology will certainly enhance it -- but it will not, in and of itself, make my teaching more or

less effective. Not until it becomes completely transparent.

In the two school districts where  I’ve taught -- and from what I hear mine are representative of Delta, and other underperforming, poor, and rural districts -- technology is snake oil that’s been sold to desperate people looking for some magic bullet to solve all of their problems. (Problems such as English teachers who mix metaphors.)

Last year, I had 18 books (My smallest class was 25) that were from 1987. There were six SmartBoards in the library. The library was open one hour a day, three days a week. The laptops and accessories for the SmartBoards had been stolen in December. The superintendent wanted to buy some doodads that would allow students to enter the answers to questions on hand-held PDA-like devices that the teacher would be able to immediately read and sort answers by student, question, or whatnot.

No one asked what the questions would be. Let me say that again.

No one asked what the questions would be.

The best technology in the world is not going to make an ineffective teacher effective.

The technology in my current classroom is a pile of PCs and monitors on the floor in the back of the room. They have “Bad 5-19-05” written on them in Sharpie. The Sharpie would be infinitely more valuable to me. There is a computer lab with 20 Gateway computers. Six don’t power up. There are 18 mice. I was given, in February, a user name and password to MySkills Tutor. It’s a basic drill-and-kill that’s supposedly aligned to our frameworks. I’ll admit I use it as a drill or skill reinforcer, and have seen some pre- and post-activity improvement. A printer showed up last week.

There are five LCD projectors that were checked out by other teachers at the beginning of the year. I have to arrange with them to borrow the projectors, and hope they don’t change their minds on the day I wanted them. There are a few TVs, unreliable DVD or VHS players, also available on a hope we remember basis.

I’m not complaining about the lack of technology in my school. (If anything I wish they’d just let me reclaim the floor space these dinosaurs are using.) If I'm complaining about anything it's the attitude about technology. There's a perception that simply by the mere act of using "technology" the "learning will happen." There is no regard for critical thinking or how the technology will be used. The belief is that if a student is doing something on a computer it's preparing them for the twenty-first century. (You know, the century that will be 15 percent over before they graduate from high school.) Other teachers working with their classes in the computer lab ask for my help to print from Word, or remove double-space formating on documents.

Meanwhile, we do not have a reliable e-mail system within the district. Technology is not used in the management and administration of the district. Principals and district staff readily admit that they do not know how to use e-mail, or access the lesson plans we are required to submit through EZ-Planner. They bought EZ-Planner on the promise it would make everything better, I'm sure. Attendance is done manually. Grades are entered on a spreadsheet program (SAM6i) that can't calculate the semester grade based on the previously entered quarters. There is no functional district online grade book or attendance system.

All that being said, I can't imagine teaching without the technology I do use.

I use the overhead projector a lot, especially for the peer teaching activities, and of course for notes. I can see how the same learning strategies could easily be translated to be used with an LCD or SmartBoard system if (when) those things are readily (and reliably) available. After all, my whiteboard and dry-erase markers are, compared with many schools, technology. So is a pencil. Or a spoon.

I use a good bit of video, both to pique student interest -- such as showing summit videos from YouTube before starting our Everest unit; and as student projects like the newscast project as a component of the assessment on Virginia Woolf's "Widow and the Parrot" unit on motive.

Technology also plays an indirect roll in my teaching. As a part of planning, I go first to a variety of online resources. When I'm ready to introduce a new concept, the first thing I do is a Google search for [topic] + lesson. My del.icio.us account is my best friend, a place to stash great ideas I come across but am not quite ready to use yet. It's a great extension of the file system begun in my methods class and is a useful complement to the digital archive of lesson plans and classroom printable resources, especially with the use of tags to make finding everything easier later.

My first year, at South Delta, I created a simple prefab blog-based web site that students could go to if they missed class. I posted notes, handouts, and other classroom information. Of course, because the district had virtually no technology infrastructure, I couldn’t require students to access the site as the sole way of catching up on missed days. As my blog entry about the process explains, absenteeism and lost paperwork were so endemic they consumed huge blocks of my sparse time and resources. I didn’t return to teach in the district after my accident on March 30, so the web page never really got off the ground. I’ll venture to say, though, that while it might have been successful in a district with functioning computers in the library, or with families who have home Internet access, it might have been a good adjunct to the various management strategies. But not there. I had a flurry of traffic in the first week, and then it went the way of all effort: Into the black hole that is the Delta’s sense of personal accountability. I’ll probably try it again next year.

I use EasyTestMaker to create and archive multiple choice tests, and Gradekeeper to maintain my attendance and grade book. (Because access at school is spotty at best, I prefer a grade book app that is not dependent on the Internet.) I use Delicious Library to organize and track books, DVDs, and other resources, and am working on a way to set up a lending system for extra-credit books for students.