Effective use of technology requires improvements in teaching. It s the combined effect of effective teaching and pedagogically sound technologies that lead to improvements in learning. We have found that when professional development and technical assistance start with a particular teaching or learning strategy that the teachers believe will benefit their students, such as cross-curricular thematic units, and then help teachers discover ways technology is a tool that supports the strategy, teachers are usually eager to try both the new instructional strategy and the technology. Each school needs easy access to professionals with expertise in technology and pedagogy. Finding professionals who have expertise in both areas is difficult, and few schools have professionals with both.
Many districts hire curriculum specialists and technology specialists and hope they work together.
While many of the barriers to using technology to support learning are the same for all poor communities, some populations have some additional issues. We know that regional efforts make resources available to the widest number and variety of programs and enable programs to build on each other s work rather than continuously reinvent wheels. However, the adult literacy education learners and settings are different enough from K-12 that the adult educators find that they also need to take these learnings and resources and then rethink and repurpose them to create methods and materials that can be effective in their own instructional settings. We also realize that educational software in Spanish, although abundant throughout the Spanish speaking world, is just beginning to appear in the Puerto Rico market. Until now, technology appeared for many teachers to be destined for the English teachers only, and not for teachers of other subject matter which are all taught in Spanish.