Learning and Leading - June/July 2009

ask ISTE members to look back on the past three decades and list their favorite teaching tools, and you will get a list of programs and gadgetry that spans the gamut of ed tech’s transformational history. In honor of ISTE’s 30^th anniversary, L&L conducted a poll asking just that question, and one thing became clear: Although many educators had favorites, most had difficulty picking a single piece of technology as the most effective for teaching and learning because today’s teachers use so many tech tools in combination.

After asking members of ISTE’s Special Interest Groups to name three tech tools they felt were the most influential in education over the course of the past 30 years, three categories emerged. These categories were: Internet tools/resources (such as e-mail and Web browsers), general productivity tools (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.), interactive whiteboards/ projectors, Web 2.0 tools, and portable digital devices. A follow-up poll on ISTE Connects ( www.istconnects. org) and ISTE’s website ( www.iste.org) then asked members to pick one of these categories and explain why they felt a particular set of tools was most effective for education.

Internet Tools/Resources

Internet tools and resources, such as e-mail and search engines, were the clear winners in our poll, garnering more than a third of the total votes. A classroom without these basic tools is difficult to imagine for some and inconceivable for others.

Charlotte Oglesby of Perry County Schools in Marion, Alabama, felt that without connectivity and the basic tools that make the Internet useful,

few technologies would have come into common use in teaching and learning.

What good would a

PDA be if we could not connect to the Internet?

Cell phones would be fancy walkie-talkies. I feel that the open access that we have to the Internet is one of the catalysts in the classroom, in teaching, and just living and working in today’s society.

General Productivity Tools

Word processing programs and spreadsheets have long since fallen off the list of hot tech tools, but educators haven’t lost sight of their value. These humble tools commanded more than 20% of the votes cast in our poll, finishing a strong second among much trendier options.

Katy Gryta of Wallace Middle School in Kyle, Texas, said that these tools, coupled with e-mail, make teaching a true collaborative profession because teachers are able to create instructional materials and then share them across district boundaries, state lines, and beyond.

The ability of teachers to use productivity tools such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Publisher to create and electronically save instructional materials is a powerful thing much taken for granted, yet we’ve had that ability widely available for the past 20 years. Without this ability, lessons would have to be created from scratch over and over, every year, wasting valuable time that could be spent improving and refining last year’s lesson.