School-Wide Factors Facilitating Technology Integration and Implementation

Abstract

We focus our remarks about recommendations for overcoming barriers to technology integration and implementation at the school level, that is, concerning elements that are associated with the overall school technology environment and shared by all the teachers at a school. These elements are usually beyond the control of any one teacher, but as a group the teachers at a school can, and do, influence the decisions and priority setting that would put these elements into place. The basis for these remarks are primarily from the findings of the Teaching, Learning, and Computing ‘98 national survey (www.crito.uci.edu/tlc) and are further elaborated upon in Dexter, Anderson, and Ronnkvist (2002), who describe the quality technology support conditions that are associated with increased teacher and classroom uses of technology; Anderson and Dexter (2001), who note additional technology organization attributes under administrators that influence the emergence of a technology-supported culture or community; and Ronnkvist and Anderson (2001) and Dexter and Seashore (2001), who identify professional community as a mechanism for increasing teachers’ learning about, and integration of, technology.