Teacher value beliefs with using technology: Addressing professional and student needs

1. Teacher Value Belief 2: Addressing Student Needs. The research demonstrated that teachers were using technology by engaging, motivating, enhancing comprehension and promoting higher level thinking.

2. Conclusion 2: Application Activity. The application activity would explicity show teachers how this idea would work in the classroom. Zhao and Cziko(2001) found that in addition to valuing a technology idea, teachers must believe the idea will work within their current abilities and enviroments.

3. Conclusion 1:Translation Activity. Professional development should be designed to explicitly target teacher's value beliefs. Translation activities should highlight how students might benifit from specific uses of technology.

4. Conclusion 3: Alignment to Teaching value beliefs.. The findings suggest some important implications for teacher development :the focus for any new technology use should target specific purpose that aligns with teacher's value beliefs associated with teaching and learning in their own classroom (Hughes,2005).

5. Study Results

5.1. Teacher Value Belief 1:Efficiency and Effectiveness. The research revealed that teachers valued technology because it helped them improve their practices.

6. Conclusions

7. Overview of Study

7.1. The hermeneutical phenomenology study investigated the value beliefs that underlie teacher's uses of technology in the classroom.

7.2. The study focused on examining the practices and value beliefs of eight teachers.

8. Defining best educational technology practices

8.1. Teachers typically develop practices from real experiences, and "appear to obtain most of their ideas from actual practice, primarily from their own and then from the practice of fellow teachers"(Kagan, 1992,p.75).

8.2. Instead of looking to what educational researches have understood and examined in terms of teacher's use, Becker(2000) argued that defining exemplanary technology integration should be "based on the actual affects of exposure..has on student's competencies"(p. 229) or allowing teachers to define what makes technology integration meaningful to them.

8.3. Harris (2005) suggested a new approach:"one that genuinely respects pegagogical plurality and honors teacher's academic freedom...broadening our research and development work to encompass many different digitally supported instructional strategies while trusting our collegues to consider and choose appropriately among us all"(p.121).