•  understand well enough what it can do and have use for it in your classroom, 
• have the money to buy it, 
• have someone around to install it, and 
• can figure out how to use it! 

What is completely disheartening is, after going through all of those steps, the device/capability/application simply fails to work! Many a classroom technology integration battle is lost right there. For busy teachers with heavy responsibilities beyond the demands of new technology, the old adage "Once bitten, twice shy" has a very serious meaning. Unfortunately, public school systems, when it comes to the responsibilities of technology, are facing a two-edged sword: we have a definite moral responsibility to teach our students the tools they will use in their future workplaces, but we must do so with considerably less support and money than those future workplaces will have! It's a difficult quandary.

There are, of course, a few things you can do to help head off disaster:

• Pre-test your use. Most failures can be predicted, since, just like the characters of a Shakespeare tragedy, the seeds of destruction are sown early and are visible at the start. Whatever you do, don't try your new tool for the first time in front of your class! Test things out thoroughly in advance - make sure you know how things are supposed to be hooked up/used/applied, by doing it all in advance.
• Don't make high demands on your tools. If you hope to get a lab full of students to download music for their new PowerPoint presentations...all at once...you'll find that your network is overloaded, and it'll rebel! 
• Enlist the help of knowledgeable folks. How does one know how high one's expectations should be? Someone has bound to have walked this path before, and can help. In most cases they may not be available when you do it in your classroom, but in some cases they are. The district supplies Technology Resource Teachers to all schools - use them!
• Have a back-up plan. Sometimes a collaborative exercise simply breaks down because everybody's in a bad mood. Such is often the case with technology! A flexible and prepared teacher can roll with these punches with a pre-examined plan that allows the lesson to go forward without the technology.
• Don't be afraid to try again. As I've stated, we can't really avoid our responsibilities here. Be prepared to give it another go, especially if the students are motivated and the tool seems important or worth it.

Above all, one should stay positive.

Of course, there will be times when, no matter what you do, things simply won't work consistently. In our society, we have traded away dependability in favor of flexibility and capability. Cell phones work very much less often than our regular phones, but we love their everywhere-accessible flexibility. The network and STI is often down, but we love being able to look up demographics/schedules/attendance instantly from our teacher desk. We are now impatient when our baked potato fails to be done in 7 minutes, when we were once content with 45. Some perspective is required...it is easy to forget how far we've come.

However, that doesn't mean that things shouldn't have to work! As suppliers of technology capability, the Office of Educational Technology has a responsibility to deliver more than just pretty computer screens and lovely ideas - things should work, and they should work dependably. If they don't for you, and you've held up your end, don't be afraid to apply that other old and tired adage - the squeaking wheel always gets the grease! If you regularly use technology, and you expect it to work, you will find that the support will find you and work with you!

        --Jeffrey L. Jones, Editor