Barriers to the effective use of technology in education.

Whilst on my teaching placement I have used technology as I am pretty technology reliant in my every day life any way, my iPhone is my alarm clock in the morning, my calendar, my diary/planner, my to do list, my music player on the walk to placement, my device for checking Moodle and emails as well as my phone and probably a myriad of other things that I have forgotten (unfortunately my iPhone cannot think for me and write this blog post for me, yet!). Besides all of these things I have also used my iPhone whilst on placement to create a quick Pinterest board for students to accompany my first workshop/lesson which I had to plan in 5 minutes as it was my first day of placement. The ability to do this on my phone and then to give the students the link to the board made the seemingly impossible task of teaching with no resources become possible.
 There are barriers to the effective use of technology at my placement and these include:

• lack of available technology; the technology available where I have been teaching consists of 3 iMac desktop computers and a photocopier/printer (which are available for students to use), a projector, mobile phones and other devices brought in from home by tutors/students.
• lack of understanding of technology
• lack of knowledge of new technology
• lack of funding
• relevance

Also, where students are asked to go away and research for themselves they inevitably come back with either reams and reams of irrelevant or incorrect information or nothing at all, attention needs to be paid to their "information skills", there is an abundance of information available but  much of it is not quality information and so students need guidance processing, evaluating and selecting the quality rich content. (Crawley, 2005)


References

Jim Crawley In At The Deep End (David Fulton Publishers Ltd., London: 2005) pg 55 - 59

Pinterest

I have just opened a Pinterest account and it looks like a very useful tool for teaching, you can easily and very quickly gather lots of information and images together on boards which you can either keep private for personal use or make public for access by others.
This is a link to the Pinterest that I have Pinterest