Technology is at the forefront of many educational reform efforts in our country, and is gaining widespread significance at the national, state, and local levels. Many perceive technology to be the "silver bullet" that will cure the ills of the nation's schools. Although there seems to be agreement that technology should be infused in education, there is a lack of research concerning how ordinary teachers use it in context and how they define its use. This study examines the conditions, processes, and consequences of technology use by three typical elementary school teachers.
Three Virginia elementary school teachers in the same school were interviewed and observed as they taught to examine conditions influencing technology use in their classrooms, the ways they employed technology, the teachers' definitions of and motivations behind their use of technology, and the resulting effects of technology use on the culture of teaching. Understanding the answers to these questions about technology provides a portrait of how teachers and a school, one not actively involved in technology reform efforts, are using, managing, integrating, and defining technology in their classrooms.
Theories of symbolic interactionism and constructivism were utilized to frame the context of the study. Analytic induction was used to generate a series of empirical assertions about the conditions, processes, and consequences of technology use. Results of the study indicate that technology use by these teachers is a complex process influenced by their beliefs about teaching and learning as well as the conditions that exist in their state, district, and school. Also, they reveal that teachers do not always use technology as a transformative tool in practice, even if their stated philosophies about learning are constructivist.
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