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!