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Tips for Tech-Cautious Teachers

By Brianna Crowley

District and school administrators have pushed our faculty to incorporate more technology tools in our classrooms. In particular, at the high school level, we’ve been encouraged to take part in a new bring-your-own-technology initiative to engage students.

This has created frustration for some teachers. After choosing to experiment with Google Forms as an alternative to analyzing scantron tests, for example, a colleague of mine spent hours creating the questions and learning the tool only to be stymied by some problems when using it in the classroom. Irritated, he asked, “So why did I do all this work when I could have just asked my students to raise their hands to get the same data?”

Whoa. Great question. Why? Why should my colleague bother to learn a technology tool that could potentially depersonalize the classroom? Why spend time setting up and using the tool, when he could quickly gather the information without technology and move on to...