Our Agenda for Technology Integration: It's Time to Choose

I sometimes ask graduate students —as an informal measure of their baseline knowledge at the beginning of a semester —what “technology integration” means to them. Here’s a sample re sponse written by a teacher enrolled in the first week of her first educational technology course: A classroom that has successfully integrated technology into the curriculum would be one where you would not really notice it because it would be so second nature. The teacher would not have to think up ways to use whatever tools were available, but would seamlessly use them to enhance the learning of whatever content was being covered. Technology [would be] used to assist in acquiring content knowledge, and t he acquisition of technology skills [would be] secondary. Contrast this depiction with what the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS -S; ISTE, 2002) say about technology inte gration: Curriculum integration with the use of technology involves the infusion of technology as a tool to enhance the learning in a content area or multidisciplinary setting….Effective integration of technology is achieved when students are able to select technology tools to help them obtain information in a timely manner, analyze and synthesize the information, and present it professionally. The technology should become an integral part of how the classroom functions —as accessible as all other classroom tools. Though both explanations acknowledge a necessary link with curriculum, the latter depiction emphasizes how students would use tools to obtain information, while the former emphasizes how students’ content learning would be assisted with tool use. T he distinction is more than semantic, and its import may well point to one of two primary reasons why many —if not most —large-scale technology integration efforts are perceived to have failed: technocentrism and pedagogical dogmatism. In this editorial, I o ffer thoughts about each of these phenomena and invite you to respond.