Review: Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching by Derek Bruff

By Kevin Abbott

Derek Bruff’s Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching explores seven teaching principles that help to match digital and online technologies to pedagogy.  

Bruff intertwines each of these teaching principles with technology illustrations and teaching practice drawn from a variety of disciplines and institutional settings.  Each chapter focuses on a different principle and is illustrated with multiple examples.  The principles covered include challenging your students with hard problems, helping students apply and learn new skills, being more responsive to student learning needs, providing students with visual ways to organize their knowledge, empowering students to work with new material across different kinds of media, structuring ways for students to learn from and with each other, and connecting students to authentic audiences for motivation and deeper learning.

In Intentional Tech, Bruff’s goal is “to inspire you to be more intentional in how you use technology…”  His example-packed and readable chapters are drawn from his own educational development as well as from his consulting and interviews with hundreds of college and university instructors over the years.  The chapters are very focused and practical with numerous stories and examples of how to use specific technologies connected with the teaching principle for that chapter.  It is encouraging to see how Bruff very convincingly argues that teaching and learning goals should drive instructors’ technology use, not the other way around.

Buy the book here, or check it out from the Kaneb Center Library (LB 2395.7 .B78 2019).