Policy, Practice, and Reality: Exploring a Nation-Wide Technology Implementation in Turkish Schools

Technology has already become an indispensable part of our lives, and nations around the world see schools as the main agents to prepare their youth for a technology-filled future, and invest important amounts of funding to provide hardware to schools, students and teachers. The Turkish Ministry of National Education is in the midst of the FATIH project, a nation-wide attempt to provide each classroom with an interactive whiteboard and each student with a tablet computer. In this paper, the authors present interview data from teachers at first-year FATIH pilot schools who are using these technologies to understand how this national attempt is being translated into practice, and identify what is working and what areas need further attunement. Results show that teachers were especially content with being able to make their lessons visually more appealing for their students. They were, however, not satisfied with the in-service training provided, especially in understanding ways to effectively integrate the technologies into their teaching, and the limitations put upon Internet access from the tablets. The impacts of these tools on their teaching practices were very minimal.