Determining the Relative Advantage

Determining the Relative Advantage (Due 2/23/05).
Describe the notion of "relative advantage" with respect to improving technology implementation methods. Identify specific teaching and learning problems that technology can help address and how it can create learning opportunities that did not exist.

Relative advantage can be summed up as how much advantage does one thing have when compared to another. This term was coined by Everett Rogers as a way of figuring out what innovation gets adopted. So teachers can try to figure out if a newer version of the software they have been using is worth the cost of upgrading.

Some of the questions that teachers should ask about adopting new innovations in technology can be the following:


- What is the problem I'm addressing?
- What evidence is there that the newer technology is worth the upgrade?
- What will this newer technology bring to the students?
- Will this improve the students overall?
- What outcomes do I expect from this software?
- How can I assess the outcomes?


When you are looking at these questions, you also want to consider what issues can arise. Some teachers will be assistant overall to adopt newer technologies because they are either used to their "old ways" or they aren't familiar with the new technology. Teacher reluctance seems to be the biggest obstacle I have found in talking with different educators. You can overcome this by holding workshops and explaining how the technology will work and improve their current situation.

Grading handwritten papers has always been a pain-staking task for teachers. If the schools can adopt some programs that students can use to type the answers to questions or write papers in a word processing program. This makes spell check, grammar check, word count, and bad hand writing a thing of the past.

One of the last big advantages to using technology in a classroom is the accessibility of information that is instantly available to both students and teachers. A teacher can be talking about say, physics. Some of the things in physics are hard to describe on a chalkboard. So the teacher could pull up a website or a physics modeling program and show them much clearer to the students.