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
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.
For fifth-year students in the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at Sweet Briar College
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
“My current placement [at Amherst High School
The problem of accessibility is not limited to the classroom. Teachers in rural areas, such as Linda Zabloski at Amherst Middle School
“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
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
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
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
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
“[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
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
The statistics support the benefits of teletherapy. Shah cites “[a] 2009 study of 34 children in rural Ohio
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
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
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
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 Arizona
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. 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
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
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
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.
