It really comes a long way for me to finalize my topic, the original intend of my topic is to create a connection between educational technologies and educational leadership, but during the process, I overly emphasis on the teacher burnouts caused by educational technologies and I had trouble finding articles and researches exclusively talking about the educational technology and the teacher burnouts. After the presentation, comments from Eva and Alex give me a new perspective to help me go back to my originally intended topic. 

There will be two parts in my topic. The first part is to describe the negative impact of new technologies on teaching profession and how it links to teacher burnouts, which can be considered as the challenge. Such challenges can be caused by multiple reasons like lack of training to help teachers master educational technologies, lack of support from school leaders on feeling comfortable using technologies. The second part will be the solution: how the teacher burnout involved using educational technologies can be addressed from the perspective of educational leadership. In other words, what school leaders can do to help teachers implementing educational technologies in the classroom. These two parts together will build a connection between educational technology and educational leadership.

References list

Cetinkaya, L. (2019). The usage of social network services in school management and their effects. World Journal on Educational Technology: Current Issues, 11(1), 116-127. doi:10.18844/wjet.v11i1.4014

Davies, P. M. (2010). On school educational technology leadership. Management in Education, 24(2), 55-61. doi:10.1177/0892020610363089

El Helou, M., Nabhani, M., & Bahous, R. (2016). Teachers’ views on causes leading to their burnout. School Leadership & Management, 36(5), 551-567. doi:10.1080/13632434.2016.1247051

Hogan, R. L., & McKnight, M. A. (2007). Exploring burnout among university online instructors: An initial investigation. The Internet and Higher Education, 10(2), 117-124. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2007.03.001

McCann, J., & Holt, R. (2009). An exploration of burnout among online university professors. JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION, 23, 97-110. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ865349

Molero Jurado, M. D., Pérez-Fuentes, M. D., Atria, L., Oropesa Ruiz, N. F., & Gázquez Linares, J. J. (2019). Burnout, Perceived Efficacy, and Job Satisfaction: Perception of the Educational Context in High School Teachers. BioMed Research International, 2019, 1-10. doi:10.1155/2019/1021408

Quinn, D. M. (2003). Legal Issues in Educational Technology: Implications for School Leaders. Educational Administration Quarterly, 39(2), 187-207. doi:10.1177/0013161×03251152

Skaalvik, E. M., & Skaalvik, S. (2009). Does school context matter? Relations with teacher burnout and job satisfaction. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(3), 518-524. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2008.12.006

Annotated bibliography

Hogan, R. L., & McKnight, M. A. (2007). Exploring burnout among university online instructors: An initial investigation. The Internet and Higher Education, 10(2), 117-124. doi: 10.1016/j.iheduc.2007.03.001

Burnout has been identified as a significant issue among those in instructional positions. In this research, the authors use a demographic survey and the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey (MBI-ES) to collect data from respondents, and then analyze the data. The purpose of this research was to identify and describe the status of burnout among higher education online instructors. The population for this study included responses of 76 online instructors employed by baccalaureate granting institutions within the United States, and data analysis here revealed online instructors possessed an average score on the emotional exhaustion subscale, high degree of depersonalization, and low degree of personal accomplishment.

McCann, J., & Holt, R. (2009). An exploration of burnout among online university professors. JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION, 23, 97-110. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ865349

Authors here examine burnout among higher education faculty members active in online courses. Additionally, this article also determines the degree of stress compared to traditional professors. This research adds to a limited body of knowledge dealing with distance educator burnout while it complements the well-researched issue of traditional face-to-face instructor stress. The results generated in this article have implications for instructor satisfaction and the motivation of online versus traditional methods of teaching. Moreover, as the authors indicated, the implications of this study will change as distance learning evolves and changes. In this research, the degrees of teacher burnout between online educators and traditional educators are compared, which can be interesting to connect with another earlier research by Hogan and McKnight.

Quinn, D. M. (2003). Legal Issues in Educational Technology: Implications for School Leaders. Educational Administration Quarterly, 39(2), 187-207. doi:10.1177/0013161×03251152

    The author stated that repercussions of fast-developing educational technology for school leaders are significant and include technology-related issues involving freedom of speech, harassment, privacy, special education, plagiarism, and copyright concerns. School leaders need to be mindful of these emerging legal conditions and understand the importance of professional development training for educators on technology and the law. With this in mind, the school law researcher and professor’s role should be to communicate frequently with educators about new statutes and how to apply legal concepts and frameworks to these developing situations. Thus, lack of training on educators on related matters will cause unwanted troubles and potentially increase teachers’ workload, which will lead to teacher burnout.

There are plenty of researches and articles looking into the advantages of educational technologies, but not many of them mentioned about the disadvantages of educational technologies and how the new technologies may causes teacher burnouts. Therefore, I want to talk about the issues of new technologies on teaching profession and how it linked to teacher burnout. In my first blog, I said that I want to talk about this problem happened in primary school, but when I am doing my research, I found that there are only a very tiny amount of researches talking about this issue. This situation started to give a feeling that I might hit the dead end pretty soon if I only looked into the connections between educational technologies and teacher burnouts in primary schools. Besides, teacher burnouts do happen to teachers across different levels of education.

Hogan & McKnight (2007) used  surveys to collect and analyze data to identify and describe the status of burnout among higher education online instructors, and they found that online instructors possessed an average score on the emotional exhaustion sub-scale, high degree of depersonalization, and low degree of personal accomplishment. (Hogan & McKnight, 2007, p. 117) Meanwhile, it is quite interesting that McCann & Holt (2009) stated that there were appreciable differences in syndromes for burnout when comparing online and traditional teaching methods among university professors, and it appears that the online instructor is less stressed than his/her face-to-face counterpart.

The two articles above are specific to the burnout of university instructors related to educational technologies. I will keep looking for articles about teacher burnouts from other levels of education.

In the last blog, I tried to focus my topic on the negative impact of new technologies on teaching profession and how it can be linked to the teacher burnout. As far as I concern, this focus will remain unchanged. However, I would like to change the focus of my research topic by including to the online education and its connections with teacher burnout.

When I am searching for scholarly articles for my topic, I came across with an article Exploring burnout among university online instructors: An initial investigation, and it really intrigued my interest. When we talk about teacher burnouts, there is a stereotype about the causes of teacher burnouts. It is assumed that teacher burnout might be happened because of the classroom management. Teachers have to keep skids in order as they are not immature enough to regulate themselves in class; however, students would know enough to behave well in university/college classrooms, and the pressure brought by class management will be lifted. What about online instructors in different distance education programs? Do they experience any burnout with no need of physically meeting students everyday?

Therefore, in addition to the original topic (the educational technology and how it might become a factor of teacher burnout in primary schools), I would like to expand the focus of my topic a little bit.

With the rapid development of computer and network communication technologies, we have come into an era of information. In order to prepare students for the world of tomorrow, schools across different countries have started to introduce various educational technologies into the classroom, and researches have shown that educational technologies indeed facilitate students’ learning and improve education efficiency. However, there are two sides of everything, it is impossible to get all the good ones without any drawbacks. This could also apply to the application of educational technology in schools. When schools and teachers are trying their best to help students use educational technologies to improve their learning performance, there are situations that teachers might not be able to fully cope with the transformation.

I take two courses this semester, educational leadership and educational technology. I remember that we have come across several educational leadership cases that experienced teachers have a hard time coping with the application of educational technology in schools. And I have also read about relevant news and articles online about educational technology being a possible factor of teacher burnout. Moreover, I am interested in this topic because of personal experience as well. My niece is a primary school student. There are about 50 kids in her class, which means that the class teacher has to deal with probably 100 parents besides teaching and taking care of 50 kids. Thus, in order to communicate better with parents, the class teacher have a WeChat (Chinese online chat application) group with all the parents and teachers of different subjects. Her class teacher has to post the homework in the chat group everyday, and answer questions and suggestions from parents on both school days and weekends, even holidays. Although communication and information technologies do help teachers have a better communication with parents, it also increases the workload of teachers.

Therefore, I am interested in doing a topic about the educational technology and how it might become a factor of teacher burnout in primary schools, and furthermore, I will also look into possible solutions that could help address this problem.

I take two courses this semester, and as both courses are moving on, I have started to see and understand the connections between educational leadership and educational technologies. Before this semester, I have not really looked into the connections between these two fields and kinda thought that these two are separated disciplines. Thus, I think I will make good use of this blogging assignment and try to explore more about the connections between the fields of educational leadership and educational technology.

I believe that there are more examples that can be used from the readings of this course, and now the first suitable example I can think about is the reading from Week 3, Toward A Sociology of Educational Technology. And earlier this week, there is a chapter about leadership (by Michael Fullan) mentioning educational technology and how it is related to the practice educational leadership. This also can be considered as an example for my topic.

I haven’t really finalized my topic, or narrow it down at this moment, but there is a big chance I would carry on towards this direction, as I found it interesting to explore.