And so did the folks at Apple Computers' educational research arm, known as Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (or ACOT). ACOT produced a model of technology integration based on stage development, assessed its usefulness through research, and then promoted it as a way to improve classroom technology use by encouraging teachers to move along the stages. Not incidentally, the research was also aimed at another bunch of names (Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, Eliot Eisner, and all those other constructivist-leaning people) in an attempt to exploit the usefulness of computers and technology in implementing student-centered learning. Although ACOT's funding dried up over five years ago, its stage development model of technology skill acquisition and classroom integration lives on. And, like anything else in education, what has caused it to live on is...assessment!

But more about that later.

 Stage development theories have a few things in common:

• Higher stages represent more knowledge, sophistication, accomplishment.
• Mastering a higher stage requires that you've already mastered the next lower stage.
• Mastery of a higher stage also presumes that a certain developmental level has been reached, making it possible for learners to bridge the gap between where they are and where they need to be (Vygotsky calls this the "zone of proximal development").

In regular classroom instruction, this can be distilled down to...to learn, students need to know some things already, and have to be developmentally ready to expand that.

For five years in Fayette County, ACOT has supplied the basis for the District Technology Assessment, a yearly set of classroom observations, online surveys, and results of special programs, which help the Office of Educational Technology figure out how well it is (and you, the teachers of FCPS, are) doing with technology integration. Since you're being assessed on it, we figured we'd use some grant money this year to show you what we mean. The results are  Stages of Teaching with Technology, a new website complete with video examples and exercises constructed to help you understand the stages of computer integration. The videos are starring SCAPA's Cammy Baxter, Rosa Parks' June Whitt, BSMS's Juan Carlos Aguilar, BSHS's Jennifer Humble, and PLD's Jason Swango. Next fall you may very well see these materials in a presentation at your school, or through a professional development opportunity. It is hoped that they'll help you grow and improve, moving from the lowest stage of technology use (Entry) to the highest (Invention). 

Self-improvement is good, and with technology becoming an ever more prominent part of our charges' lives, it is important that we keep up! By the time you reach the advanced age of this writer, they will no longer call them "stages of development" but "passages" (see the book by Gail Sheehy)...something to be experienced and endured, rather than things that cause growth and improvement!

        --Jeffrey L. Jones, Editor