Investigative Article (Final)

Facing the Struggle to Balance Technology and Education

Maria El-Abd

            Inflating the software report card. A Silicon Valley school that doesn’t compute. Educators evaluate learning benefits of iPad. Out with textbooks, in with laptops for Indiana school district. Should students bring their own technology devices to school? One-on-one speech therapy goes digital. Schools seek the right mix of digital computing devices. Questioning our mania for education technology. In classroom of future, stagnant scores.

In the era of technology, headlines such as the ones above are a practically daily occurrence. The issue of technology’s role in education is heavily charged, with numerous aspects to consider. While some news articles focus on the shortcomings of technology in the classroom, others showcase schools and districts that have decided to take the plunge and go digital, while still others highlight the continuing struggle to balance technology and traditional teaching methods.

The debate itself is roughly divided into two sides. The opponents of technology in the classroom argue that school districts as far as Munster, Indiana or Kyrene, Arizona are spending too much money on technology despite the lack of evidence to support its effectiveness. Meanwhile, on the other side, the supporters of educational technology believe that it helps students become more engaged in school and, consequently, perform better.

But the problem is not just philosophical; it is also financial. According to the New York Times, this classroom software boom is estimated to cost school districts throughout the nation $2.2 billion a year. A more recent report by the Software and Information Industry Association estimates that the U.S. market for educational software and digital content is worth about $7.5 billion. Taking into account the nation’s economic state and what billions of dollars could do to improve underfunded schools that are often struggling to stretch their budgets to underpaid teachers on a pay freeze and a lack of supplies, the decision to spend billions on unproven technology appears to many to be unwise.

For fifth-year students in the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at Sweet Briar College, this focus on technology in education is one they can’t ignore. This past May, Sweet Briar received a grant from the Verizon Foundation to integrate technology in K-12 classrooms. As part of the two-year pilot, MAT students are provided with iPads to use in their student teaching experience.

In the grant proposal, Holly Gould, Department Chair and Associate Professor of Education at Sweet Briar, and her colleagues wrote, “[t]he increased prevalence of mobile devices in use by the learners mandates that teachers develop lessons and learning objects accessible to their students in forms they prefer. The end goal is to enhance the classroom experience and, ultimately, the achievement level of the students they teach.”

Asked about the benefits of technology in the classroom, Sweet Briar President Jo Ellen Parker said, “[t]his is one of the most challenging and important educational issues of our day: for which students can what technologies support what learning outcomes?”

As the many articles on this topic prove, the answer to this question is far from being found.

ACCESSIBILITY

            In order to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of using technology in the classroom, it is first necessary to have access to that technology, and this step can often prove to be a problem.

            Samantha Benito is a graduate student currently enrolled in Sweet Briar College’s Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program. One of her classes, “Instructional Strategies for the Differentiated Classroom,” requires a field experience placement in a local Amherst, Campbell, or Nelson county school.

            “My current placement [at Amherst High School] only has a projector and a document camera,” stated Benito. “I feel like the main reason I have a hard time incorporating [technology] is because of the limited access.”

            The problem of accessibility is not limited to the classroom. Teachers in rural areas, such as Linda Zabloski at Amherst Middle School, face similar problems if they want students to be able to use technology for learning at home.

            “I would love to see each student with their own laptop to download lessons and then have the ability to review them at home,” said Zabloski. “[But] internet access is a huge barrier to students in this rural community; only about 1/3 of my students have computer/internet access at home.”

            Within the classroom, though, some schools are willing to do what it takes to ensure they are technologically in sync, no matter where the budget cuts are made.

            When interviewed for the New York Times, Nicole Cates, Co-President of the Parent Teacher Organization at the suburban Arizona elementary school, Kyrene de la Colina, stated “[w]e have Smart Boards in every classroom but not enough money to buy copy paper, pencils, and hand sanitizer. […] You don’t go buy a new outfit when you don’t have enough dinner to eat.”

            Teachers who try to avoid this issue by allowing students to bring their own technology devices to class may be inviting a new type of problem with them.

In a blog post on Education Week’s website, Patrick Ledesma, a National Board-certified teacher and School Based Technology Specialist in Fairfax, Virginia, questions whether or not students should be allowed to bring their own personal technology devices to school.

According to Ledesma, “[i]n this potential era of student devices, we could see classes in some schools where all students are focused on a single platform and organized for using technology for higher levels of thinking. We could see mixed classrooms with hodgepodges of technology where a teacher could potentially struggle to support multiple devices and software/operating system formats. And, we could see classrooms not using technology at all.”

But even when accessibility to technology is established, a new set of problems can arise.

TRAINING

            According to Zabloski, when it comes to technology, “[t]raining for teachers is an important aspect. [Amherst] County does offer training, but with little time for practice and follow-up. We only have one tech person to help for 3 schools; he is only in our building 1-2 days a week.”

            Jeff Frank, Assistant Professor of Education at SBC, believes that teachers need to be trained to use technology before entering the classroom. According to Frank, graduate students in the MAT program “are experimenting with, and learning the strengths of, the iPad while still in graduate school so that they can strategically use this technology to increase student learning when they graduate.”

            Emma Neave, a senior majoring in English at Sweet Briar who plans on entering the MAT program next year, believes that incorporating technology in the classroom needs to follow careful planning and pre-assessment to see what works and what doesn’t.

“Even then,” added Neave, “I think it can be trial and error—you may think computers will be great for your hands-on learners or that SMART Boards are great for your visual learners, but until you try it a couple of times, you’ll never know.”

            The time and cost involved in trial and error has some educators worried, especially when school districts are quick to make the digital leap in an effort to keep up with the latest technologies. In an article posted recently to Education Week’s website, Rob Residori, a technology coordinator for Chicago’s Striving Readers project, said “I sometimes question if everything has really been thought through. […] Is this the best use of our funds, or is it simply a tool to engage and motivate our students? Of course, technology has that capability, but is that always the best angle?”

            The school district in Munster, Indiana, a small town with roughly four thousand students enrolled in either public or private schools, recently went digital, replacing, over the course of several short months, all math and science textbooks with laptops and interactive computer programs. According to the article on The New York Times, despite the excitement, some teachers are feeling overwhelmed by the sudden change.

            “This isn’t stressing out students,” said Pat Premetz, chairwoman of the Math department at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Munster. “It’s stressing out teachers because of some of the technological problems, and parents who are wondering why their kids are on the computer so much.”

Whether or not they provide adequate teacher training, schools throughout the nation are increasingly tempted to turn to technology to reap the benefits it can help provide.

DIFFERENTIATION

According to Anna Newberg, a graduate student in Sweet Briar’s MAT program, using technology in the classroom “makes education more personalized and less focused on the teacher. Students have the chance to be in control of their own learning.”

For future teachers in Sweet Briar’s education program, letting students feel they are in control of their own learning is an ideal goal to have. In fact, it is part of the philosophy of the education program at Sweet Briar, where the focus is on training teachers in differentiation, an educational philosophy that advocates for teachers to create lessons that match different students’ readiness levels, learning preferences, and interests. Ultimately, it rejects the notion that teaching is one-size-fits-all. To this end, lessons are often created that allow students to explore new material in small groups. As the students in each group enjoy a different activity created for how they learn best, the teacher serves as a sort of moderator or guide for the learning process.

According to some teachers, technology not only facilitates differentiated teaching, but it lends itself to it naturally by providing various new opportunities to access the same material in different ways. Additionally, technology can be useful in the differentiated classroom by allowing students to express what they’ve learned in new ways.

“I think offering students options in the types of products they can create outside of school—for example, digital stories—as a means of illustrating their engagement with the concepts of ideas they are learning in school is a great start,” Frank stated. “Students familiar with the technologies can grow in those technologies and in their understanding of the school subject.”

            Gabriella Muglia, a junior at Sweet Briar College, is a perfect example of how students can use technology to self-differentiate their learning.

“[Technology] definitely enhances my ability to learn, if used properly,” Muglia said. “I often use the translator app [on my iPhone] to look up words in Spanish class that aren’t in the back of the book. I’m a visual learner also, so text on the screen is more likely to be memorable than having my professor say the word.”

Neave agrees that technology can help teachers differentiate, if the technology is used to help students with particular needs. Struggling learners, for example, may benefit from using recorders, headphones, or various computer programs that give students better access to the material.

John Gregory Brown, Director of Creative Writing at Sweet Briar, has witnessed first-hand technology’s ability to personalize and simplify learning for students with specific needs.

“Our first experience with technology in the classroom was the result of our disabled daughter, whose fine motor skills are poor, needing a device to make writing easier for her,” recalled Brown.

At the time, which was more than ten years ago, the standard equipment for students struggling with writing was an Alpha Smart, a lightweight keyboard-like device. However, Brown insisted that his daughter be allowed to use a computer, which was easier for her to operate.

“It took a while,” continued Brown, “but the school finally understood that it didn’t make sense to prohibit a student from using a device that makes learning easier and leads to the student being more confident and accomplished. I think about that experience all the time when I’m confronted with trying to figure out how to make learning easier and more engaging for students.”

Sharyn Papet, Early Childhood Special Education Teacher at Central Elementary School in Amherst, Virginia, uses technology to enhance learning for children with autism.

For example, Papet lets students “write and spell their name with a computer if they have fine motor issues [or] communicate using a VOCA (voice output communication device) like the iPad instead of being frustrated, not being able to share feelings, [or] respond to questions.”

            Nirvi Shah, in an article for Education Week, wrote about the Fall River Joint Unified School District in California, which now provides one-on-one speech therapy online. In the article, she discussed how teletherapy is particularly useful for remote and rural areas in the country, where school districts struggle to hire speech therapists. Shah wrote, “[w]hen students work with therapists online, often with therapists located out of state, that challenge is resolved.”

            The statistics support the benefits of teletherapy. Shah cites “[a] 2009 study of 34 children in rural Ohio, in which half the students used online speech therapy for four months while the others used traditional face-to-face therapy for four months, then switched.” In the end, the researchers discovered that the progress of both groups was the same.

            Despite technology’s ability to meet individual student needs, not all teachers are quick to use it because they fear the stress that might come from trying to balance numerous forms of technology simultaneously in the classroom.

            Melanie Lewis, Instructional Technology Resource Teacher for Amherst County Public Schools, described one such class where various forms of technology could be used to meet student needs. For example, one group could work on a project that includes a narrated VoiceThread, a multimedia slideshow that lets viewers navigate through the slides and leave comments. Another group could create an online poster using Glogster, a website that lets people create interactive online posters, while auditory learners could listen and respond to podcasts.

For a teacher in a class of potentially thirty students or more, balancing these various forms of technology, while they may help with differentiation and student engagement, can be more stressful than teaching the same lesson to the entire class using nothing more than the whiteboard. Planning, according to Lewis, is key.

She said, “[d]ifferentiation, though it may be easier with technology, is not an automatic when using technology.  The teacher still needs to plan accordingly and respectfully while thinking about the student’s needs and learning styles.”

BUILDING CONNECTIONS

In addition to helping students with different needs, another benefit of technology in the classroom is its unique ability to help students build connections.

            According to Frank, “[t]he iPad can be a useful tool in building connections between students and the subject they are learning. […] If students know that their work will be made public—or shared with partner classes across the country or world, it might make the work more engaging, relevant or authentic.”

            On the benefits of having technology in the classroom, Brown noted, in addition to being more environmentally friendly, “[t]he best aspect of the shift to the web has been the class blogs. Students share their ideas and their writing not just with fellow students but with anyone who is interested in what they have to say, which has even included the author of one of the story collections we’ve read.”

Despite the numerous advantages of technology in the classroom, it can be, as Neave stated, a “double-edged sword.” Most commonly, a paradoxical disadvantage of using technology is that it can, in addition to help learning, distract from it. For example, Newberg said that although she would like to allow students to use personal laptops during class, she fears they could be distracting. Her solution is simple: “[t]hey need to be monitored.”

In public school classes that can contain more than thirty students, though, monitoring each student’s use of technology can be a real challenge for a single teacher, if not impossible.

            Muglia’s agrees; “Even though I am not the kind of person that brings technology to class to intentionally distract myself,” Muglia stated, “I do think that it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible for most students to exclusively use their devices for educational purposes; this is partially because of the fact that modern technology is built to be extremely dynamic, so you don’t get devices that have been manufactured for one exclusive purpose.”

She then added, “I’ve had moments in class where I have to actively focus on not looking at the ever-changing computer screen next to me that is triggering my brain to look at it. I get really frustrated when this happens because I want to be paying attention and am not even using my device, but can’t pay full attention because half of my focus is on trying not to focus on someone’s improper use of technology.”

Neave believes that although trust plays a large role in letting students use technology, “that temptation [for distraction] will always be there and you’ll have to be really observant and careful to make sure students stay on task. I think it differs based on age.”

Distractions aside, teachers have other concerns when it comes to technology, even those in Silicon Valley. The Waldorf School of the Peninsula focuses on learning through creative hands-on tasks and physical activity. Technological devices are neither allowed nor encouraged, not even at home.

Interviewed for The New York Times, Pierre Laurent, who has three children in Waldorf Schools, said, “[e]ngagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers.”

With the move towards technology, though, students may spend less time with their teachers and more with laptops and iPads. While the learning may still be the same—and some would argue better—when using technology, there is a fear that by losing human contact in the classroom, students are missing opportunities to interact and grow with others, as well as develop the necessary social skills.

More than five years ago, Marilyn Jones, an English teacher at Shelbyville High School in Indiana, wrote about this same concern in an article for TIME magazine: “[k]ids will be captivated by multimedia geography presentations and interactive math labs. But the old fundamentals will still apply. Students rely on compassionate teachers to guide, to tutor, to listen, to laugh and to cry with them. Teachers provide the most important link in the educational process—the human one.”

For that reason, some opponents of technology in the classroom believe technology, unlike social and emotional growth, can wait.

For example, despite holding a computer science degree from Dartmouth and working in executive communications at Google, Alan Eagle, like Laurent, sends his daughter to the Waldorf elementary school. He stated, “[a]t Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”   

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Another argument for technology in the classroom is that students are more engaged in the learning process when they can use technology than they would be otherwise.

For example, Neave acknowledges the widespread influence of technology and believes it’s a strength teachers can use in their favor.

“In the last lesson I taught,” Neave recalled, “I had my students use [a] PowerPoint presentation to transform instances of figurative language into a literal format. This made a subject that is often very cut-and-dry much more interactive and real for my class. They weren't just reading similes and metaphors in a book; they were able to visually interpret precisely what those similes and metaphors meant, and they enjoyed it so much.”

A recent article by Mary Beth Marklein on USA Today described the story of Brianno Coller, an engineering professor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. In an effort to “throw away the textbook,” Coller created a video game that allows his students to build virtual race cars which they then test, learning computational math, a building block of engineering, along the way. In his research, supported by the National Science Foundation, Coller discovered that students who used his video games “spent roughly twice as much time doing homework and demonstrated deeper learning compared with students who learned through traditional lectures and textbook.”

According to Frank, there is a common assumption that students enjoy or are engaged by personal technologies, such as phones, video games, and online social networks. Coupled with the general belief that students find school uninteresting, some people assume that if school was to imitate personal technologies, it would become more engaging to the students.

However, Frank added, “I don’t think things are so simple. Like other things that students are interested in—say rap music, or comic books—a rap version, or a comic book version, of Shakespeare more often than not is bad as rap, or as a comic, and bad as Shakespeare. So, forcing emerging technologies to do old things and believing that that will make schooling better seems off to me.”

The overwhelming lack of statistical support for technology’s effectiveness in the classroom seems to second Frank’s beliefs.

            In The New York Times article about the Kyrene School District in Arizona, Matt Richtel notes that, since 2005, the district has invested nearly $33 million in technology. Despite the investment, though, scores in reading and math have remained unchanged in Kyrene, while Arizona state scores have risen.

Richtel wrote, “[t]o be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up—here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”

            In another article, Matt Richtel and Trip Gabriel discussed a 2009 federal study that looked at “10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading [and] found that nine of them, including Cognitive Tutor [a software designed by Carnegie Learning to improve standardized test scores] ‘did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.’”

            According to their reporting, the lack of statistical data supporting technology in the classroom is hidden by companies like Carnegie Learning, which advertises their products in such a way to attract teachers and administrators, gaining additional followers by hiding discouraging statistics.

They noted, “[a]t Dundalk Middle School in Baltimore County, Md., for example, Carnegie Learning says that Cognitive Tutor led to an increase in the passing rate of a state assessment, to 86 percent in 2004 from 49 percent in 2002. What it does not say is that the rate remained at 85 percent last year [2010], even though Dundalk dropped Cognitive Tutor in 2007 because of difficulties arranging lab time.”

And as schools face budget cuts while still expanding their technological resources, one effect, expressed by Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher at Aprende Middle School in Arizona, reinforces the worry that students are spending less time with their teachers. According to Furman, “[y]ou can’t continue to be effective if you keep adding one student, then one student, then one student.”

MOVING FORWARD

Neave observes, “I may not be teaching full-time yet, but I think how we are going to use technology in our classroom is something we need to start thinking about and planning for, because it's changing all the time.”

            President Parker agrees that technology, at least for the time being, is unavoidable. She said, “[m]ost academic disciplines these days rely on new technologies. Students need to be able to use and understand the tools that are shaping their disciplines in order to use and understand current scholarship.”

            As technology develops and is integrated more into school systems throughout the world, Brown expressed doubt that it would ever fully disappear from the classroom. “Since technology will clearly remain the means by which students access, gather, and analyze information,” he said, “it makes sense to have the use of technology be one component of a class.”

Because of the constant changes in technology, Frank believes the focus for teachers should be on something more than the technology itself. He said, “[i]t is important that teachers are trained well in technology before entering the classroom. But, it is also important that teachers are trained well to know the subject that they are teaching. And, it is important that teachers are trained well to understand the needs of the students who are in their classrooms.”

The emphasis here is on the needs of the students; unless technology helps support those needs, its role in the classroom is questionable at best and damaging at worst.

Similarly, Neave believes that using technology simply for the sake of technology overlooks a basic point. According to Neave, teachers need to “make sure it's right for the lesson and for your students, and that it will add something greater to their understanding of the material.”

And even if technology is proven to support learning, the unavoidable truth is that technology is continuing to change, and quite rapidly.

For that reason, Frank continued, “instead of focusing on instrumental things […] teacher education programs need to prepare students for uncertainty, because change is integral to what it means to teach. Technology is just one more added layer. It is an important layer, but it is no more important than the other types of changes that teachers will manage and respond to from year to year.”

Reference List

Davis, M. (2011, Oct. 17). Schools seek the right mix of digital computing devices. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/

Gabriel, T., & Richtel, M. (2011, Oct. 8). Inflating the software report card. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Jones, Marilyn. (2006, April 13). Teacher’s view: The human touch. TIME. Retrieved from http://www.time.com

Ledesma, P. (2011, June 28). Should students bring their own technology devices to school? Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/

Marklein, Mary Beth (2011, Nov. 29). College’s latest thrust in learning: Video games. USA Today. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com

Quillen, I. (2011, June 15). Educators evaluate learning benefits of iPad. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/

Richtel, M. (2011, Oct. 22). A Silicon Valley school that doesn’t compute. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Richtel, M. (2011, Sept. 3). In classroom of future, stagnant scores. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Schneider, J. (2011, Oct. 4). Questioning our mania for education technology. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/

Schwarz, A. (2011, Oct. 18). Out with textbooks, in with laptops for an Indiana school district. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Shah, N. (2011, Oct. 11). One-on-one speech therapy goes digital. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/

(28 Nov. 2011). SIIA estimates $7.5 billion U.S. market for educational software and digital content. Software and Information Industry Association. Retrieved from www.siia.net

                                                                                              

A Local Teacher's Perspective

I recently heard back from an interview with Sharyn Papet, M.S.Ed., an early childhood special education teacher. One of the questions I asked her yielded a great response about specific ways in which students with different learning needs can use technology to meet their educational goals; here's what she said:

"Students can best use technology:

a. to write and spell their name with a computer if they have fine motor issues limiting their use of a pencil (more traditional form of writing)

b. to communicate using a VOCA (voice output communication device) like the I-PAD instead of being frustrated, not being able to share feelings, responsd to questions, etc.

c. to increase attention of some students with special needs as their is instant gratification, multi-sensory programming, immediate feedback, visual stimuli, one-on-one learning opportunities, as well as rote-drill and instruction available with both the I-PAD and the Smartboard."

Re-assessing the stakes

In the process of revising my rough draft, I was looking for more sources to cite in my article. I came across a more recent estimate of how much educational software and digital content--excluding hardware--is worth: $7.5 billion. This estimate, mentioned in a report  by the Software and Information Industry Association, is astounding.  Compared to the $2.2 billion estimate I had been using earlier, based on an article in the NY Times, this new estimate takes the stakes even higher than they were before. I mean, if we're willing to spend $7.5 billion on technology in the hopes that it helps learning, shouldn't we at least check that it's doing what we want it to?

Revising the Rough Draft

One of my least favorite aspects of writing is the revision process. It is tedious, nit-picky, and overall requires more effort than the creation of the rough draft, but I also realize it is necessary for the improvement of one's writing. So, currently, I'm in the process of revising my investigative article rough draft. There are two main points that I need to address: I need to interview more local teachers, and I need to reconsider the structure of the benefits/disadvantages sections.

As for interviewing more teachers, I asked my education professor for help since she's familiar with teachers in the local area, and she was able to connect me with someone in the local school system to be interviewed (thank you, Dr. Gould!). Now, it's just a matter of waiting to hear back about the interviews.

As for restructuring the sections, my current draft has a section about benefits, followed by a section about disadvantages. I think, for my revision/final draft, I'm going to weave the two together and follow each individual benefit with a counterargument (disadvantage) to balance the perspective more immediately. Then, since I will no longer have a section just for benefits and one for disadvantages, I will have several smaller sections instead, with each one focusing on one particular aspect of technology in education. Possible sections include differentiation (what are the arguments for and against technology helping with this aspect of education), more connections (or, as some would say, distractions), and statistics.

Hopefully, with my plan in place, this revision process won't be as intensive as usual!

The Final Word

For this article, I've already chosen the quote I want to end with, although I haven't quite decided yet on which parts of it to use. It came from an interview with an education professor at SBC, Jeff Frank, and I think it's probably the best approach to technology in the classroom because it doesn't focus specifically on trying to adapt to technology, but learning to adapt in general, which is what teaching is really about.

He said, “It is important that teachers are trained well in technology before entering the classroom. But, it is also important that teachers are trained well to know the subject that they are teaching. And, it is important that teachers are trained well to understand the needs of the students who are in their classrooms. All of these things—technology, the subject, students—change (sometimes quite dramatically) from year to year. So, instead of focusing on instrumental things (the newest technology, the latest changes in content, the most publicly heralded demographic changes), teacher education programs need to prepare students for uncertainty, because change is integral to what it means to teach. Technology is just one more added layer. It is an important layer, but it is no more important than the other types of changes that teachers will manage and respond to from year to year.”

The Issue of Accessibility

As I was writing my rough draft for my investigative article, one of the sections I felt deserved attention was the issue of accessibility to technology in the classroom. After all, we can't really have this debate--should we have technology in the classroom or not--unless we actually have access to technology in the first place.

To help address this issue, one of the sources I relied on was a blog post on Education Week's website. The writer, Patrick Ledesma, asked if students should be allowed to bring their own technology devices to school. He then looked at different scenarios that could happen based on the school itself. In short, it relies largely on the demographics the school serves. If the school serves students who come predominantly from wealthy families, letting students bring personal technology devices to school--iPads, MacBooks, and anything else--may not be such a bad thing. If, however, the school serves students from the other end of the economic spectrum, the results may be a lot more complicated. Teachers could have students bring in iPads, cellphones, MP3 players, or, quite possibly, nothing at all. The challenge here wouldn't just be to remedy any social issues that arise, but also to handle any technological issues that result from having so many different software/operating system formats in one class.

Imagine, then, a school that is suffering from budget cuts and doesn't have enough money to supply each classroom with the technology other schools have. What do they do? Do they ask students to bring in their own technology devices, or is this an option better left alone?

Excerpt from paper

I'm so glad Professor Brown agreed to be interviewed for this article, because he gave me one of the most convincing stories about how technology can really benefit students in the classroom; the following is an excerpt from my paper, relating the story he shared:

John Gregory Brown, professor of creative writing at Sweet Briar, has also witnessed first-hand technology’s ability to personalize and simplify learning for students with different needs.

“Our first experience with technology in the classroom was the result of our disabled daughter, whose fine motor skills are poor, needing a device to make writing easier for her,” recalled Brown.

At the time, which was more than ten years ago, the standard equipment given to students struggling with writing was an Alpha Smart, a lightweight keyboard-like device. However, Brown insisted that his daughter be allowed to use a computer, which was easier for her to operate.

“It took a while,” continued Brown, “but the school finally understood that it didn’t make sense to prohibit a student from using a device that makes learning easier and leads to the student being more confident and accomplished. I think about that experience all the time when I’m confronted with trying to figure out how to make learning easier and more engaging for students.”

Lede idea

Check out all of these sources I've been using to support my investigative article; in fact, I'm planning on using the titles, just like they're listed below, as my lede, to show how much attention this issue is getting, and to show all of the different viewpoints involved. I think lists can be pretty powerful if used for the right topics--especially when they juxtapose so many varying ideas together--and I think (and hope) it works well in this case. Let me know what you think of the idea:

Inflating the software report card. A Silicon Valley school that doesn’t compute. Educators evaluate learning benefits of iPad. Out with textbooks, in with laptops for Indiana school district. Should students bring their own technology devices to school? One-on-one speech therapy goes digital. Schools seek the right mix of digital computing devices. Questioning our mania for education technology. In classroom of future, stagnant scores.

To go digital, or not to go...

...that is the question I'm trying to answer in this article on technology and education. And as I'm working on my rough draft for it, one article from the NY Times has proved very useful in providing one side of the argument.

The article begins by showing the stakes involved in this issue, and they're higher than you might think. To be precise, the stakes are estimated at about $2.2 billion a year. That's right. Billion. That's roughly how much money is spent yearly on technology in the classroom--money that could be going towards plenty of other useful purposes within schools. And it's no secret that schools are running on dreadfully and increasingly lower budgets.

But beyond the stakes, this article shows there are numerous issues with running so quickly to embrace technology in the classroom. So many schools and teachers advocate technology with blanket statements, such as "Technology helps engage students more." Or, "It helps them make connections." Or, "Students get so excited when they get to use technology." This article from the NY Times (titled "Inflating the Software Report Card," by the way) shows the problems with such beliefs, using an abundance of statistics for support. While claims about the attractions of technology may be true, they fail to answer a very basic, yet crucial question: is our focus on the right place? Is technology helping our students learn?

Without an answer to that question (and an affirmative one, at that), our race to see who can include more technology in the classroom may not be a race we really want to win. 

Interview excerpt

As promised, here's an excerpt from an interview I conducted recently. Gabriella Muglia is a junior at Sweet Briar, and when interviewed, she gave me some of the best responses I could have hoped for. Here's her response to one of my questions. And by the way, I particularly like how she points that technology is not built for just one purpose, and therefore, it can always be a distraction. Maybe that's the problem, then, for teachers who try to use technology in the classroom. Just a thought. I'd be curious to hear what others have to say about it.

Me: Does technology in the classroom (used by either yourself or by other students in class) ever distract you from what you’re supposed to be doing? Please explain.

Muglia: I think this is a given. Even though I am not the kind of student that brings technology to class to intentionally distract myself, I do think that it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible for most students to exclusively use their devices for educational purposes; this is partially because of the fact that modern technology is built to be extremely dynamic, so you don't get devices that have been manufactured for one exclusive purpose. However, I definitely think that determining whether or not this is a problem fully depends on the student. For instance, I get pop-up notifications when someone sends me an email or text, but I typically disregard responding unless it looks urgent or requires a simple yes or no answer. Admittedly, I am guilty of sending emails or texts during class on occasion, but if I do send a text, I can still focus on what is being said during the few seconds it takes to respond. I never shut off my attention to what is happening in the classroom. Obviously, there are some students that are unable to do this, probably because they don't care about the class to begin with and they attend classes without much desire to be fully attentive, on a regular basis.

Investigative Article Topic: Technology and Education

The focus of my investigative article is the intersection between technology and education. Schools throughout the nation are turning to technology in the classroom, thinking (and hoping) it will help students become more engaged in the learning process. However, after conducting numerous interviews with students and professors and looking into past articles on the topic, it quickly became clear that the issue is not quite so simple. Whether or not technology works in the classroom (and what, exactly, we define as "working") depends on the type of technology, the age of the students, the focus the students have, the use of the technology itself (are students using it for what they need to be doing, or are they on Facebook when the teacher isn't looking?), and, of course, how well the teachers have been trained to use technology in the classroom.

In conducting my research so far, my only difficulty has really been sifting through all of the articles online. There are simply so many of them, and they each offer a different perspective on this complex topic. My interviews have been going great so far (I'll be sure to post some excerpts from them in the coming days), and the abundance of news articles on the topic is definitely a big plus.

Finally, here are some links to some of the articles I've found so far. A lot of them come from EdWeek, which has a section titled "Digital Directions" that focuses solely on technology and education. Basically, it's a gold mine for this article because it offers so many different perspectives, all consolidated into one site. Needless to say, I've been using it very, very much.

More specifically, of the articles I've found most useful so far, one discusses the lackluster effects of technology in the classroom (courtesy of the NY Times), one looks at a school in Indiana that went digital (also at the NY Times), and one discusses a school's efforts to find just the right balance of technology in the classroom (found at EdWeek). I'll be sure to post more articles and links as I find them, so stay tuned!