Technology, Teaching and Learning: Issues in the Integration of Technology

The Atlantic Canada Education Foundation and Alberta Learning require teachers to integrate technology into their classroom practices. The Alberta legislature mandated the integration of technology into all areas of the curriculum in its province in the fall of 2000. Various stakeholders want to see technology used for emancipatory and democratic purposes. The question is how best to do this in light of budgetary considerations and the technical limitations and skills of some teachers. What instructional philosophies and pedagogies are guiding this initiative? The experts in this area focus on the confluence of pedagogy, technology, and the culture of schooling. It examines the issues surrounding educational practice in an age of rapid change and curriculum innovation. Foreword, forearmed? For what exactly? For facing the question, in the case of this book, of what we have with this new digital, multimedia, information technology. Could we really be on the verge of a new era, culturally, educationally? The contributors to this collection come at this pressing question of the immediate present and near future, not with sweeping generalizations or prophetic pronouncements, but far more cautiously and curiously. They work from the intimations that can only be drawn from what students and teachers, as well as the contributors themselves, are making of these new tools. They recognize that the principal issue in integrating technology into the classroom may well be perspective.