Aaron Headly

Aaron Headly, former technical support specialist at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, talks about the importance of on-site technical support when high-performance technology is incorporated into the curriculum. Excerpted from a videotaped interview for the video series Learning with Technology, program #2, Tools for Thinking (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1995).

"If you're planning on bringing this level of technology into a classroom, it's important to remember that the teachers are there because of their knowledge of curriculum and their ability to teach and if the computer is just going to be a tool help them teach, you can't type the teacher with questions like my machine won't boot, you're power supply won't go wrong. There's a thousand little things that can go wrong that are relatively easy to fix, but if there's not someone there to do it, the class is going to go to a halt, and it's a trained teacher's time to deal with these little problem, and if that's what they spend their whole time doing, then the whole thing's stuck."

This Critical Issue was written by Alan November, senior partner at Educational Renaissance Planners in Evanston, Illinois, and Carolyn Staudt, an educational consultant, in conjunction with Mary Ann Costello, a free-lance writer, and Lynne Huske, Pathways coordinator at North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Development and production of this Critical Issue were supported in part by the North Central Regional Technology in Education Consortium.

Date posted: 1996
Revised: 1998