Relationships Are Key for Technology Enhanced Education

Randy Hetherington

Dr. Randy Hetherington

This week Dr. Randy Hetherington joins the Techtalk crew to discuss lessons learned in his thirty-two-year career as a teacher and administrator who has seen multiple waves of new technologies come and go.

For Dr. Hetherington, the key to ensuring that the enhancements technology can bring to teaching and learning reach all students is to build individual relationships with all teachers, whether they are tech-savvy or tech-averse.

“The smart administrator,  the smart teacher, would seek to build relationships with those who were onlookers, and were interested…..but didn’t have the confidence, the self-efficacy that they too could do it. That’s the essence of managing any change and navigating through it. You have to build relationships not just with the mustangs (early adopters), but also with the workhorses and the Luddites. If you build relationships with everybody… you can move the entire campus forward. If you don’t have those relationships…it happens in little pockets, and all of the students don’t get the benefits.”

We really enjoyed talking to Randy and are so thankful he stopped by and shared some of his wisdom with us. If you’d like to connect with him he can be found on Twitter @rwhetherington.

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Full Episode Transcript: PDF

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Continue the conversation at the Teaching & Learning Community Blog: https://sites.up.edu/tl

UP TechTalk is a bi-monthly podcast with cohosts Ben Kahn and Maria Erb of Academic Technology Services that explores the use of technology in the classroom, one conversation at a time.  Visit the UP TechTalk archives for a plethora of excellent content from our UP faculty guests.  Get a sneak peak at the future with our UP Tech Talk special 5 part series The Future of Learning.

Benjamin Kahn