Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
be a concern to all involved in the global community. Black (1995, p. 7) stated that “students
(need) to be better prepared for workplace challenges requiring a strong technology
background.” Black further discussed the skills needed by a technology-literate workforce
(Black, 1995, p. 21). It is noted that minimal technology skills reside in the areas of word-
processing skills, database entry and manipulation, spreadsheet entry and manipulation,
desktop publishing, graphic development and manipulation, and audiovisual recording and
manipulation (Black, 1995, p. 21). Roman (2001) recently commented on the reasons why
businesses like technology education. He stated that the global business community needs
workers that are more broad thinking. The current and future worker community needs to think
multi-dimensionally. Problems are not clear-cut and do not require unidimensional solutions.
Workers need to work in a team and pool their thought processes together to solve the
dilemmas and problems that face society. Teamwork is the key to future work environments.
The technological tools help to provide a framework for that teamwork. Electronic mail and
asynchronous chat sessions provide information to be shared between team members on a
variable time schedule. Synchronous chat sessions provide for real-time exchange of ideas
without regard to geographical location. Technology education is practicing these new
communication procedures and is experimenting with audio and video on-demand environ-
ments. As video servers become more popular, one will be able to record an event and have
an audience easily play it on-demand from any location on earth. Discoveries in space could
be recorded and viewed by students at a later date. The educational implications break down
time and space limitations for communication and the collaboration of ideas and solutions
in today's and tomorrow's learning and working communities.
These technological tools are meaningless unless the users of tomorrow, the students
of today, are properly trained to use them. The students of today are working with today's
teachers. The current teaching staff must receive immediate and extensive training in
instructional technology. The future teachers must also receive this education if they are to
take their place as leading teachers in the classrooms of tomorrow. They must cultivate the
critical-thinking skills of their students, as they are challenged (McCoy, 2001).
So, the call to action to prepare our students for success in a global community was
presented to all professionals. The immediate response was to install network backbone
equipment and enable Internet service providers to connect classrooms and schools to the
Internet. Servers, routers, and firewalls were added to thousands of schools. Staff develop-
ment programs were implemented to provide some support to faculty. Sessions in word
processing, graphical presentations, and harvesting images from the Web were conducted.
However, the vast numbers of retiring faculty are creating gaps in the numbers of technologi-
cally experienced teachers in our nation's school systems. It is imperative that teacher
preparation programs incorporate the proper and best practices of instructional technology.
Instruction in the use of technology for preservice teachers needs to begin in the first
semester of the freshman year. Teachers are needed to prepare students for the technologi-
cally rich 21
st
century (Black, 1995, p. 15), and those teachers need to be skilled in using
technology to teach (Tomei, 2001, p. 4).
Black (1995, p. 7) surveyed corporations to determine the skills needed by a technology
literate workforce. She found that America seeks novice workers that possess the skills
necessary to create, edit, and print word-processed documents. They must also be capable
of reliably entering data into a database and querying that database. Regarding the use of
spreadsheets, she found a need to be skilled in entering, editing, and printing spreadsheets
and to be able to create and print a graph from spreadsheet data. One must be able to import
