Instructional Technology

It is one of many such tools employed by great teachers to engage different learners and strengthen student outcomes. Teaching remains the most human of endeavors. Tech manufacturers build machines that have a fixed lifetime. The best teachers build relationships that last a lifetime. Children are not set for success when technology is effectively ‘the tail that wags the dog.’

There is, though, enough to warrant concern about the adverse effects of technology when not strategically employed and carefully supervised.

 This position is justified only when the school can clearly link technology integration to strong learning outcomes for each and every student.

Careful analysis of such claims can reveal a very different reality; one in which ‘technology integration’ is more a marketing and admissions ‘hook’ than authentic and meaningful experience for every student. Parents considering any school promoting technology and technology integration should find out how much student ‘screen time’ is truly curriculum and learning related versus ‘other.’

More than a few schools invest heavily in personnel, hardware, software and infrastructure without having first taken the time to carefully research and establish how technology will best serve student learning. St. John’s will not be one of those schools.

Administrative mandates or ‘top down’ directives to teachers to ‘integrate technology’ simply don’t work or serve students well.

The heart of a truly great educational experience for children is a robust, challenging, and dynamic academic curriculum. Technology should support the curriculum and not the other way round. Nor should technology be the curriculum.

Tablets, laptops, and smartphones are powerful devices that open the world to users via the Internet. Just as technology can and does expand horizons, stimulate curiosity, and engage young minds, it can also be a tremendous distraction and, worse still, dangerous and harmful. Children can end up in trouble with technology not because they are ‘bad’ but because they are not developmentally mature enough to ‘handle’ the technology made available to them.

Truly great schools have a clear and well-communicated vision for technology integration and equally well-developed strategies for implementation of said vision.  They also engage in ongoing ‘cost-benefit’ analyses of technology, from both educational and budgetary standpoints. In other words, schools need to be able to demonstrate to themselves and parents a positive return on the tremendous human and financial investment they make in technology.