Teachers, pedagogy and professional development - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 91

over time be seen to have the effect of making it increasingly difficult for schools left
behind in technology adoption to catch up.
Relationships between barriers
Understanding the barriers to the uptake of technology by teachers requires more analy-
sis regarding the relationships between the barriers (Younie 2007) - for example, access.
There are different kinds of access problems, ranging from a lack of resources to the
poor quality of resources available, to noting that even where 'sufficient quantities of
quality resources were available, teachers were still experiencing problems, as a result
of the organization of those resources' (Jones 2004: 11). One example would be, if the
majority of computers were housed in technology suites that needed advanced time-
table booking. Add to this lack of technical support and the frequency of technical
problems (due to old, poor-quality hardware), then technical faults lead to lower levels
of technology use; recurring faults and the expectation of faults during lessons cause
teachers to avoid using technology (Jones 2004: 16), just as the lack of reliability 'lost
a whole group of teachers' in the 1980s (Hammond et al. 2009: 49). However, by mov-
ing to mobile devices, including pupil's own, which are more robust and reliable with
advances in technology, these earlier barriers should disappear.
Similarly, the issue of training is complex and concerns a multiplicity of interre-
lating factors. Examples are: the lack of time for training, which Snoeyink and Ertmer
(2001) identified as a significant barrier; the lack of pedagogical training (Veen 1993);
lack of skills training (Preston, Cox and Cox 2000) and lack of leadership support
(Preston 2004). Yet, from the wealth of research evidence, we know that effective
technology training is crucial if teachers are to implement technology in classroom
practice (Kirkwood et al. 2000). This barrier is more complex, however, than the sin-
gularly identified element of 'training'. Rather, it is how the training is supported by
other crucial factors, such as ongoing technical support, leadership and levels of col-
legiality, which are both material and cultural (Younie 2007).
Factors supporting teachers' use of technology
Interestingly, apart from the previously mentioned OCED study into the adoption
of technologies in schools (Leask 2001), the research that has examined the factors
supporting teachers' uses of technology has tended to be large scale, quantitative
and American, with little qualitative research (Hennessy et al. 2005). No surprise,
too, is the fact that what facilitates technology integration is the corollary of what
prevents teachers using it - most notably providing access to technology resources
and training. With the advent of affordable computers and access to the Internet
in the 1990s, there was an international drive to integrate technology into teach-
ers' practice (Pelgrum 2001; Leask and Younie 2000). In America, the following
large-scale, quantitative studies all used survey data to identify the key factors that
support teachers' uptake of technology (from Sheingold and Hadley 1990; Kerr
1991; Hadley and Sheingold 1993; Becker 1994; all USA, and 'world-wide'; Pelgrum
2001).