Blog entry # 6 Jan 25, 2010

Reflection as a Critical Component of the Technology Adoption Process

By: Koszalka, Tiffany A

Summarized by

Adeba Sultana

Introduction:
The focus of educational technology training today is only on teaching students how to operate the equipment. Educators need to reflect more on the component that adds to the professional development program and attend to the cases beyond skills development and more toward educational technology adoption.

Adoption of Innovation:
When individuals learn about the innovation they begin to develop an attitude to either reject or pursue the innovation. A good base for adopting technology is to have interaction, successful practice with an innovation, and careful reflection of new situations and outcomes.

An Approach to Prompting Reflection:
A successful strategy to help educators move through the stages of adoption is to form structured, short, open-ended questions. “Educators pay more attention to strategies of inquiring about their reasoning and develop greater abilities to enhance teaching and learning through the innovation” Koszalka (2003).

Conclusion:
Educators need to be able to specify for themselves the relationship between the theoretical benefits of an innovation and successful practice.
Reflections help educators integrate technology strategies that lend themselves to the arrangement of the classroom.

Reference:
Koszalka, Tiffany A (2003). Reflection as a Critical Component of the Technology Adoption Process