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?

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. 

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!