Book Review: The Classroom Teacher's Technology Survival Guide

Technology is evolving our ever changing world. It allows us to complete tasks quicker and easier, communicate with others instantly, and share information easier than ever. But how reliable is technology and are students given the opportunity to thoroughly learn about it? Chapter one of the text, The Classroom Teacher’s Technology Survival Guide, describes how administrators limits both teachers and students use of technology in the classroom. “Society is asking schools to accomplish two difficult goals: (1) guarantee that every student has basic skills, and (2) prepare an even larger number of graduates for a knowledge-based economy that requires workers who are self-motivated, can solve genuine problems, can communicate well, have the interpersonal skills to work collaboratively and can upgrade their skills by purposely continuing to learn” (Johnson, 2012, p 20). I believe we are setting up schools to fail in this regard and many schools do not have the resources to accomplish this feat. But technology is dominating our society and we need to address it and adapt.

Technology is everywhere; in the home, office, restaurant and the classroom. As teachers, we need to begin to embrace this technology and apply it to our students’ lives. But this begins with the teacher’s attitude and according to Johnson,

The reliability revolves around security, “concerns about security keep many users from trusting and using data in school” (Johnson, 2012, p 13). My current company has a strong stance on security and it makes doing my job difficult, frustrating and time consuming. The technology is not always reliable because the administrators have put many blocks in place. Teachers can also experience this within the classroom because many of the resources they want to utilize are not available to them because the administrators have put website blocks in