11/4/07

Workshop A: Broke: When Technology (and Budgets) Fail – RM 117

Barclay Barrios, Florida Atlantic University

When it comes to technology in writing programs and writing classrooms, what can you do about being broke? In this session we will explore answers to this question in two dimensions. First, we will look at ways to fund technology in our programs despite perpetually tight budgets that leave us all broke. Then, we will look at strategies for overcoming teacher resistance to technology that itself is all too often "broke"--projectors that won't work, software that crashes, computers that won't boot. Many teachers encounter these failures when trying computers in their classrooms for the first time and take those failures to be the defining nature of technologies, abandoning this dimension of teaching because it doesn't work or it's too much trouble. Turning what's "broke" into pedagogically enabling moments provides teachers--even the most tech-savvy ones--with additional tools for coping with and using technology in the classroom.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey! They left off the cool part of the title. It should be Broke:When Technology (and Budgets) Fail...

Nick Carbone said...

Thanks for the heads up, Barclay. I made the correction.