Leslie Whittington's List: Effects of Tech on Learning

• The student-centered, hands-on, personalized instruction envisioned by ed-tech proponents remains the exception to the rule.

   

  "The introduction of computers into schools was supposed to improve academic achievement and alter how teachers taught," said Stanford University education professor Larry Cuban. "Neither has occurred."

• Case study after case study describe a common pattern inside schools: A handful of "early adopters" embrace innovative uses of new technology, while their colleagues make incremental or no changes to what they already do.

   

  Researchers have identified numerous culprits, including teachers' beliefs about what constitutes effective instruction, their lack of technology expertise, erratic training and support from administrators, and federal, state, and local policies that offer teachers neither the time nor the incentive to explore and experiment.

• A clear description of what student-centered, technology-driven classroom instruction entails is laid out in standards developed by the Washington-based International Society for Technology in Education.

   

  "You can do student-centered teaching without technology. There have been teachers doing that for a long time," said Wendy Drexler, ISTE's chief innovation officer. "But tech is not going away, and we want to have teachers using it effectively."
• In the digital age, the ISTE standards say, teachers should be expected, among other strategies, to "engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources." They should also "develop technology-enriched learning environments that enable all students to become active participants in setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and assessing their own progress."
• "Most teachers have 'domesticated' innovative technologies by incorporating them into their existing repertoire of teacher-directed practices," he wrote in his 2013 book, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice: Change Without Reform in American Education.

• In his research for that book, Mr. Cuban revisited the technology-rich Silicon Valley high school featured in his seminal 2001 book, Overused and Oversold: Computers in the Classroom.

   

  At the turn of the 21st century, he had found that "most teachers [at the school] had adapted an innovation to fit their customary practices."
• Still, Mr. Cuban wrote, "all but a few of the teachers at [the school] used a familiar repertoire of instructional approaches: lecturing, conducting a discussion, and occasional use of technologies such as overhead projectors, videos, and computers."
• "In general, teachers at many schools seemed to view technology as a more valuable tool for themselves than for their students," Ms. Shapley wrote.

• In 2010, for example, researchers Peggy A. Ertmer of Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind., and Anne T. Ottenbreit-Leftwich of Indiana University, in Bloomington, took a comprehensive look at how teachers' knowledge, confidence, and belief systems interact with school culture to shape the ways in which teachers integrate technology into their classrooms.

   

  One big issue: Many teachers lack an understanding of how educational technology works.

   

  But the greater challenge, the researchers wrote, is in expanding teachers' knowledge of new instructional practices that will allow them to select and use the right technology, in the right way, with the right students, for the right purpose.
• A 2014 paper by researchers at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, provides a tangible example: Teachers and students in the small-scale study were found to be making extensive use of the online word-processing tool Google Docs. The application's power to support collaborative writing and in-depth feedback, however, was not being realized. Teachers were not encouraging group-writing assignments and their feedback focused overwhelmingly on issues such as spelling and grammar, rather than content and organization.
• Researchers have found, for example, that even innovative teachers can be heavily affected by pressure to conform to more traditional instructional styles, with a teacher as the focal point for the classroom. Newer teachers inclined to use technology in their classrooms can also be deterred by experienced teachers who feel differently.
• Perhaps the most obvious—and overlooked—barrier to effective ed-tech use is that totally changing the way you do your job takes a ton of time and work.

• Later, he described his own experience trying to implement the technology-integration training he has received through the same multidistrict consortium on personalized learning in which Ms. Howton takes part.

   

  While he's very motivated to make his instruction more student-centered, Mr. Bacon said, "What I'm finding is I'm having a hard time doing it that right way, a wholesale change."His attempts to move in that direction have been frustrating and draining.
• So how can schools and districts better support teachers in transforming the way they teach?

• One strategy that most researchers and experts seem to agree on: so-called "job-embedded" professional development that takes place consistently during the workday and is tied to specific classroom challenges that teachers actually face, rather than in the isolated sessions often preferred by district central offices and written into districts' contracts with their teachers.

   

  "When learning experiences are focused solely on the technology itself, with no specific connection to grade or content learning goals, teachers are unlikely to incorporate technology into their practices," concluded Ms. Ertmer and Ms. Ottenbreit-Leftwich, the researchers who wrote the 2010 paper on the factors influencing teachers' use of educational technology.

   

  Another oft-cited strategy is putting to work those "early adopters" inside a school who are making innovative, student-centered use of technology in their classrooms. "The smarter districts use those teachers to teach other teachers how to integrate tech into their lessons," Mr. Cuban said. "The dumb ones use vendors to provide professional development and force teachers to attend those sessions."
• Such dilemmas are part of why it's most realistic to expect that, for the foreseeable future, teachers' use of technology in the classroom will typically follow a bell curve, with those using student-centered approaches in line with the ISTE standards mostly remaining outliers
• "When all the stars are aligned, you can think about fundamentally changing how you've always done business," said Ms. Wilson of the One-to-One Institute. "But remember, changing how we do education is like trying to move Mount Everest."

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• Jim Tracy, headmaster at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Mass., sees the "process of technology coming into the classroom as inevitable." Under Tracy's watch, Cushing has provided an interactive whiteboard in every class and wifi access across the high school's campus for students to use laptops and tablets. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is Cushing's implementation of an all-digital library.

  "We were able to offer our students a library that was anywhere on campus where they were," Tracy notes. "For the same amount of money you would pay for a few thousand books on a shelf, you could have access to digital databases that give students access to literally millions of sources."

• One theme that has emerged from the research to date is that simply adding technology to K-12 environments does not necessarily improve learning. Rather, what matters most is how students and teachers use technology to develop knowledge and skills. Successful technology integration for learning generally goes hand in hand with changes in teacher training, curricula, and assessment practices (Zucker and Light, 2009; Bebell and O'Dwyer, 2010; Innovative Teaching and Learning Research, 2011). Edutopia's review of the literature also finds that successful technology integration generally involves three key principles:

    
  • Students playing an active role in their learning and receiving frequent, personalized feedback
   
  • Students critically analyzing and actively creating media messages
   
  • Teachers connecting classroom activities to the world outside the classroom