Benefits and Challenges of Educational Technology Integration
The study of Carver (2016) which was conducted on graduate students of education department of the Florida-based institution revealed teachers’ opinion regarding to the hurdles and the benefits of integrating technology into teaching. Before Carver, many studies suggested different methods to categorize obstacles to technology integration. In this study, the author applied the classification system developed by Ertmer et al. (1999). The system classified extrinsic barriers which have nothing to do with the teachers and intrinsic barriers which are engendered by teachers into first-order and second-order categories respectively (Ertmer et al., 1999).
Regarding barriers to technology integration, about 76% of the respondents reported that first-order factors, such as amount of technology, location of technology, amount of instructional time, and availability of support personnel have significant influence on their decision of using technology for their instruction. Among those first-order factors, the amount of technology was indicated as the most impactful. The second-order factor that was pointed out by a quarter of respondents was teacher knowledge and skills.
When it comes to benefits of integration, a majority of respondents (59%) indicated that technology enhances student engagement. The other benefits which are improving student understanding, increasing instructional differentiation, extending exposure to more current content material, providing more opportunities to use research and evaluation skills shared the remaining 40% of responds.
In addition, the study (Carver, 2016) revealed that instructional concerns were not the main reason for applying technology as more than half of the time teachers decided to incorporate technology in the light of its availability instead of its relevance and applicability to the instructional content.
References:
Carver, L. B. (2016). Teacher perception of barriers and benefits in K-12 technology usage. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology - TOJET, 15(1), 110-116.
Ertmer, P. A., Addison, P., Lane, M., Ross, E., & Woods, D. (1999). Examining teachers’ beliefs about the role of technology in the elementary classroom. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 32(1), 54–71.