The education environment has changed over the last few years with the introduction of new teaching technologies. For schools/colleges to benefit from this they need to bring technologies into the core curriculum and use blended learning.
There are a number of barriers that teachers have identified the common ones are: vision, access, time, assessment, and professional development (Franklin, et al., 2002).
Vision: Most teachers do not have a clear understanding of curricular uses of technology within the curriculum. “An important step in achieving meaningful technology use is to
develop a vision of how to use technology to achieve important educational goals” (Ertmer, 1999, p. 54).
Access: Lots of schools and colleges do not have the resources to pay for the cost of new technologies.
Time: It is imperative that teachers are allowed time to develop their skills to learn to use new technologies in the classroom. However teachers have a full workload and sometimes this is not a priority.
Assessment: New technologies and applications to aid the assessment of lessons are widely available but again this is down to teachers learning these new strategies and having the time to undertake new training.
Professional development: Franklin, et al(2002) describe that teachers professional development must confront the traditional methods of teaching and work out the best way forward in terms of supporting the curriculum and examine the new blended learning strategies that incorporate the computer to determine the best way forward to support the curriculum.
References
Ertmer, P. A., 1999. Addressing first- and second-order barriers to change: Strategies for technology integration. Educational Technology Research and Development. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47(4), p. 54.Franklin, T., Turner, S., Kariuki, M. & Duran, M., n.d. 2002. Mentoring Overcomes Barriers to Technology Integration. Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, Volume 18(Number 1).
