Be the sound of a tech savy teacher (there is no sound)

Graham Wegener's Teaching Generation Z blog reflects on The Blue Skunk Blog's perspective on Hiring a tech savvy teacher. In particular I was taken with the question:

How should a tech-savvy teacher create lesson plans? What is the mix of off-the-shelf apps, teacher-created projects/apps and traditional media (books etc.)? I've always thought the first sign of a technologically literate teacher is one who knows when to use technology and when not to use technology. A good teacher will use a variety of instructional strategies depending on the needs of the individual learner and the skill to be mastered.

It was just earlier today that I was faced with the imortance of this point; knowing when to use technology. Namely that tech savvy teaching doesn't just mean that you use computers. At the end of the day computers / the internet can be a potentially wide-band medium for us to convey our message with (just as a pen and paper can be narrow band). I think that potentially, the sound of a tech-savy teacher is going to be the sound of someone making the links between formal literacy lessons, various classroom discussions, pen and paper / chalk and talk learning activities. All of these things need to come along (and sometimes it may seem like these things come kicking and screaming) when one enters the tech-savy ICT zone.

I think that all too often we see teachers entering the computer room as if that room were a place apart, another realm on the far side of a great divide. And routinely we see lessons undertaken as if all that had been planned and learned in the past was now, somehow, irrelevant (i.e. that's old technology). It's not any great point, but it has to be recognised that ICT is everywhere - it isn't a mode in other words like old word processing programs used to operate (1st I'm in type mode, then I'm in preview mode, now I'm in print mode after I've been in spelling mode). ICT is essentially modeless - or it should be - and we should recognise that, ideally, technology is not a divide in our lives, rather it is everywhere. I'm sure that a lot of teachers get put off the idea of teaching ICT / or teaching in a tech savy manner because they do not realise this very point. And so they still go to the computer room and think 'computer mode'.