Staying Where I'm At

After looking at all of the areas in which instructional technology is prevalent (military, healthcare, higher education, etc.), I see myself staying where I am, in the P-12 education environment, specifically, at the elementary level.

I currently am the technology facilitator at a P-5 school and really do see it as the place where I intend to stay with my degree.  Elementary school has always been the area to quickly recognize the changes of society and adapt to them.  Maybe it's because we get them first, and don't get much of a buffer zone.  However, because of this, we constantly are asking ourselves what is needed to stay relevant to our students.  I feel this is especially evident when it comes to technology and it's use in education.  The trends and technologies we begin to use and follow in early education move with our students as they proceed through the system.

The district I work in now, recently has made technology a priority.  However, even with its importance in the district, I see that the elementary schools are the ones that seem to be a little bit ahead of the middle and high schools.  Even the role of the technology facilitator (TF) is very different among elementary, middle, and high schools.  The way things are now, our elementary TFs are the ones that seem to be most immersed in the instructional design process with a lot of focus on curriculum and incorporating technology.  With the size of our middle schools and high schools, the TFs at that level tend to spend the majority if their time troubleshooting technology issues and training staff (although some are doing an awesome job to change this).  While we do these things also at the elementary level, we also have a lot of opportunity to design lessons for teachers, model lessons, and interact with students, and this is the part of the job that I enjoy most.

In a perfect world, one where education has lots of money and all of the resources that are needed, TFs would spend their time working with students and teachers and guiding them in the instructional design process.  We would have several technology specialists at each school, some focusing on design and media, others focusing on media repair, some focusing on staff development, and still others to take on the many other facets of instructional technology.  Since this is not the case, I like working at the elementary level, because it allows me to focus more on the aspects of instructional technology that appeal to me.

I do not have a lot of questions about the current environment I work in (I'm so new to the job, I'm still don't even know enough to even know what exactly I don't know).   However, I do question the future of my job in schools.  As I stated above, ideally, there really needs to be multiple people that focus on instructional technology at each school.  With the increase of the need for "21st Century Skills" and the gap continuing to widen between students and staff in perception of technology, I don't see schools as being able to keep up with instructional technology if things stay the way are.  With the limited amount of resources, personnel, and funding given to the area at the present time, I don't feel it can keep up with the changes. I am very interested to see what instructional technology will like like on our schools in the very near future, and am excited to be a part of it.