Guests: Carole Vinograd Bausell, project director for Technology Counts 2007 and Andrew Trotter, Education Week technology writer.
Kevin Bushweller (Moderator):
Welcome to today's chat about Technology Counts 2007: A Digital Decade.
A preliminary report from the ETS suggests that many cannot. For example, of the students tested, only 52% could accurately judge the objectivity of Web sites. We have an interesting chart with some of this information on page 27 of Technology Counts.
The digital generation gap is the more severe obstacle, and not just by administrators; many teachers have barely awakened to the huge amount of time students spend online for entertainment and communication. If adults thought hard about students' ways of relating to information, one another, and school, they would find some new ways of operating.
For example, some teachers now direct students to math games online for skill practice; many teachers post class assignments etc. on class Web sites for parents to see; teachers are trying podcasts to help students to review for tests, there are many many ideas out there.
Teachers who are on top of this trend are finding some new needs, too, because as we report in Technology Counts, students often have a surface ease with technology, but do not know how to judge the accuracy of online information.
It's a tough shift for schools that for years have gotten technology money from windfalls, such as grants, or in lump sums from bond levies, or as part of new school construction. But it is vital (and is how businesses do it); the Consortium for School Networking, in Washington, has a lot of ideas on this subject.
Teachers can't make this change themselves, of course, but they can communicate about the problems. Some teachers are good at coming up with workarounds and standby activities; encourage them to share ideas.
Some folks would agree that computers could be a distraction if not used purposefully as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. NAEP has data from 2005 showing how teachers are using computers which you may find intersting too.
I substitute teach in some low income schools and hear students lament that they are so tired of not being allowed to learn because of the naughty behavior of disruptive students. Yet, I almost shudder to take the whole class to the computer lab.
WHAT options outside of school could be or need to be developed so the brighter students have exposure to scientific/mathematical ideas which are not necessarily available in the school's print library?
Andrew Trotter:
Educators generously have created loads of Web sites full of activities in math and science that would stretch bright students. For a start, try using Google to search for the Cornell Theory Center's "Math and Science Gateway" out of Cornell University. It links to many other sites.
Another kind of activity that might be adaptable to different ability levels is the Web Quest, a series of research challenges on a given topic. I don't know the fine points of how to put together an effective Web Quest, but I'm sure there are some, so do some research first.
Andrew Trotter:
I think students are writing both worse, and better. On the worse end, teachers complain that students cut-and-paste from online sources or simply repeat or paraphrase information without thinking critically about it.
On the better side, researchers who have studied student writing since the 1980s have found students feel more motivated when writing with computers and they produced papers that are neater, somewhat longer, with fewer spelling and grammar errors. The quality of the style and content is about the same, researchers have found.
But researchers have also found that students who normally use computers to write perform better on writing assessments when they use computers, rather than pencil and paper. That's a logical finding, but it has implications for standardized testing, which today offers both paper and computer versions of writing assessments.
Many educators also fairly readily accept the automating of time-consuming school functions, such as using electronic gradebooks. But experts say they tend to resist more innovative uses of technology that change the teachers' role: for example, Web research projects that give middle and high school students more control over their own learning.
Teachers don't want to let go of the podium. But they also rightly fear that students will have poor judgment about trusting information on wikis (informational Web sites that allow just about anyone to contribute). The answer is to give students' lessons in literacy for the digital age, but that requires changes in curriculum and teacher training.
Carole Vinograd Bausell:
I’ve heard how much easier technology makes teaching and learning in the arts from others too Ruth Ann. There’s a good article, “Teaching Assistants,” in Technology Counts. In it two art teachers talk about how they use drawing software and streaming video in their classes.
We do know that some states facilitate access to learning resources in the arts through group purchasing programs, collections of online resources, and subscription services. But the State Educational Technology Directors Association has a wealth of expertise about funding in technology so you might check their reports at www.setda.org/
Carole Vinograd Bausell:
What you are seeing in your students is interesting Ami. The results of our state technology survey in Technology Counts reveal that most states are offering teachers professional development to help them effectively integrate instructional technology into the classroom.
Courses in some states cover topics as innovative as handhelds, tablet PCs, digital whiteboards, podcasts, and online course-management systems. Also 39 states offer some form of professional development online for educators (although this is not necessarily technology-related).
However the Teaching Assistants article in our report suggests that a majority of teachers may not be comfortable with newer instructional technologies and explores some of the reasons for this.
Community groups have also provided volunteer staffing and given new and used equipment to help local young people and their schools gain access to technology. Some projects, such as volunteer efforts to wire schools and donate old computers have had mixed results, because they came with unanticipated costs and technical problems.
Grant-making organizations tend to favor flashy, cutting-edge projects that will spread lessons widely. But communities need old-fashioned community service to keep valuable efforts going.
Carole Vinograd Bausell:
Ed, this is a really key question in an age where principals are expected to be instructional leaders. We found that 36 states have technology standards for administrators, but only 9 states require courses or a test for an initial administrator license. And just 13 states offer incentives for administrators to use technology.
You might be interested in looking at a program in West Virginia. The state’s department of education sponsors a summer institute for nominated principals. They receive materials, resources and equipment to support 21st century learning in their schools.
On the other hand, schools that are trying to be innovative have a better chance to win grants; foundations don't pay to support well-known methods. And leading-edge schools usually develop better in-house expertise in technology that can help many aspects of their program.
Being a laggard, as opposed to a middle-of-the-packer, results in missed opportunities. Schools risk being out of touch with today's digital kids. They may misunderstand trends such as social networking, student online publishing, student cell phones--resulting in clumsy, ineffective policies regarding such things.
George Washington was an innovator in agricultural practices in his day; I'm sure he would be computer-savvy today.
www.teachweb.org
Andrew Trotter:
I don't know that project. But digital portfolios--which are computerized methods of storing, organizing, and sharing student work--are catching on in many school districts, who want to have a richer picture of student learning than they can get with standardized tests.
This year's Technology Counts shows how a Rhode Island school uses digital portfolios to assess student progress. Students upload their best work products--text, audio, and scanned artwork--to their online porfolios. Teachers see benefits from students' self-appraisal and from getting a broader look at their performance.
Andrew Trotter:
Here's what I've heard from teachers and experts: Teachers, first of all, need good access to technology themselves, such as their own laptops and fast Internet connections. They need training on each new technology that the school adopts.
Teachers should also be encouraged to participate in online and in-person professional forums to share ideas and expertise, both in the school and beyond. Teachers will need a bit more planning time in their schedules to incorporate technologies into their lessons, especially during transition periods.
Having both a tech-savvy librarian/media specialist and a school technology coordinator, who is also a teacher, will go a long way to getting past technical problems and on to real learning.
The school needs a reliable technology budget.
I could go on. None of these ideas is new, but schools have trouble implementing them.
It is worth noting though that students from lower income families often don’t have the same technology at home as their higher income counterparts. So for them, school may be the only place to become conversant in the high tech world.
Andrew Trotter:
The school's academic supervisors, starting with the principal, have got to be sophisticated about the use of technology in learning. It is a mistake for a school to send only teachers to training and conferences on education technology without having administrators get the same grounding, too.
Schools need to have clear plans on how each piece of the curriculum is taught, which spells out the role of technology as well as other methods. Then, those methods can be evaluated in light of data from student assessment.
Some states that have more detailed technology standards for students include keyboarding in those standards. North Carolina, for example, requires students to become familiar with a keyboard in kindergarten. In 5th, 6th, and 7th grade, students are expected to learn proper techniques and gradually increase in productivity and accuracy in keyboarding. In the 8th grade, students take an online assessment of computer skills. Keyboarding is one of the topics tested.
Andrew Trotter:
I haven't reported on technology in independent schools lately, but I suspect they face many of the same challenges of technology integration that suburban public schools do.
An article in Technology Counts, cites a 2005 survey in which 80 percent of teachers said that their students used a classroom computer less than half their time in class.
That suggests that there is a lot of room for more integration of technology into the classroom. Not to mention the new types of technologies coming down the pike that will change the integration challenge.
Long ago, some school learned the great value of having a school technology coordinator, who knows the technology but who is also a teacher. This professional will understand classroom challenges like a purely technical specialist cannot.
It is a special web-only feature created in honor of Technology Counts' tenth edition that examines key educational technology trends over the past ten years and features information from previous editions of Technology Counts as well as Education Week articles.
It's true that teachers need methods they can use on Monday, not 10 years from now.
But new tools and media are available now, if schools think creatively. The same article, for example, in one school teachers record stories in English that students with weak English skills can download onto their iPods and listen to after school.
Andrew Trotter:
So far, digital technology has been adopted most successfully to automate functions in school, including communication, information access, and back-office administrative tasks.
Technological methods for student learning have been uneven, depending greatly on the abilities and training of the teacher. Some would argue that this means that teacher quality will always take precedence over technology tools.
As you suggest, however, there has been a lot of research into creating computer-based "environments"--some like tutors, some like video games--that use findings from cognitive science to teach academic concepts. Much more research is needed for these tools to become well-developed and affect more than a few strands of the curriculum.
Students need to learn how to manage their personal technologies appropriately, which probably includes keeping them turned off in class, unless the assignment includes calling up an expert, or listening to a relevant podcast.
Carole Vinograd Bausell:
Hi Daryl. You bring up really important issues.
Many states now require their teacher prep programs to train teachers to use technology in their teaching. A smaller number of states (19 actually) tie teacher licensure requirements to technology coursework or a test. And professional development in technology for teachers is one of the goals of NCLB so it is widely offered in schools, although it may be optional.
The Metiri Group came out with a report "Technology in Schools: What does the Research Say" in November 2006. One of the findings was that students’ performance in virtual classrooms was as good as or better than their performance in face-to-face classrooms. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in September 2006 announced plans for a five year study to research technology’s effect on students, so hopefully we will be learning more on how younger students fare with virtual education. You might also look at the article in Technology Counts that starts on page 30.
You might find that students, with their own laptops, will be inspired to work on digital art projects on their own time.
But you should quickly join an online community of art teachers that you can tap for ideas about how to use those laptops. They will have many more suggestions than I do.
Carole Vinograd Bausell:
Sheri, We have found that many states look to ISTE-NETS for guidelines on technology standards. http://cnets.iste.org/students/index.shtml The ISTE-NETS standards are very broad, and when it comes to digital media, they say that students should use and create developmentally appropriate multimedia products.
But you can also look at states like Wisconsin which has more explicit guidelines on digital media. http://dpi.wi.gov/standards/pdf/infotech.pdf The standards include the common media formats that students should know by the ends of grades 4, 8, and 12. The standards even go so far as to recommend that students do things like produce a short video program or use video conferencing equipment by the end of grade 12. Hope this is helpful to you, and good luck with that.
When we sent students to the library, where materials were classified (500s and 500s were science, 100s is occult, etc) and selected (library funds are limited and libraries only bought the better reviewed materials), students were mining a rich resource efficiently. Today's online sources are neither classified nor selected and the search engines push slick commercial and political sites to the front. During the recent election, we saw manipulation of web hits driving searches for "evil" to various politician websites, and commercial enterprises now advertise services to push your site to the front of searches...so much for the "wisdom of the commons." So-called techniques for recognizng quality of websites only work for advanced experts, not novice students.
(How can they know that the Discovery Institute is a creationist site, not mainstream science?) What is the future consequence of our throwing students into this vast low-quality wasteland versus other countries that do limit students to bonafide science websites? My student teachers estimate that in biology, the percent of science-inaccurate websites in the first hundred listed ranges from 60% to over 90%, depending on subdiscipline.
Carole Vinograd Bausell:
Another way to look at the question about years in school, is to examine outcomes rather than time spent reaching those outcomes. In this day and age of compentency-based testing that's pretty easy to do.
I completely agree about the importance of giving students the tools they need to use technology effectively, ethically, and safely. The preliminary report from the Educational Testing Service’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Assessment that we reference in Technology Counts suggests substantial disparities in students’ abilities in that regard.
Andrew Trotter:
You're right that many teachers think 1:1 computing is the ideal. But it is hard to convince school boards because no rigorous study has demonstrated unequivocal learning gains from having a 1:1 computer to student ratio.
Such a study would be very complex partly because of the many ways laptops could be used.
No question, laptops are very expensive and need to be upgraded and replaced every few years. Theft and loss are another problem. Some experts think schools could get significant benefits for less money by using other digital mobile devices on a 1:1 basis.
Learning activities are already available for handheld computers and advanced cell phones (with GIS), including those that students are bringing to school in their pockets.
But online technology is a great assist, bridging distances and marshaling resources that can save time and money and propagate the best ideas.
Chief among contributing educational psychologists and scientists were people like B. F. Skinner, Robert Mager, Robert Gagne, Bob Glaser, Karl Popper, and Norbert Weiner. They focused on such things as programmed instruction, feedback, individualization, criterion-referenced objectives, and self-paced learning.
In general, they viewed the learner as a participant in a cybernetic system of reciprocal feedback.
Computers are unique in their capacity to support such systems. The popularity and addictive power of computer games is obvious evidence.
Yet there remains a dearth of computer-based instructional material that seems strongly and intentionally founded on early ed tech notions. Most programs merely attempt to automate traditional instructional tasks usually performed by teachers, e.g., present material, administer tests, maintains scores, etc.
Are the fundamentals still being taught? To what extent do they guide developers of computer-based materials and those who use and critique them, namely teachers?
__Jack Fretwell, Owner
Starboard Training Systems
jack@capjax.com
Andrew Trotter:
The learning systems that you refer to have heirs that are still used in schools today, to drill students in basic skills in reading and math. Teachers often disparaged them as "drill and kill" but the fact is that research in the 1980s showed that they were effective in achieving their admittedly narrow learning goals.
Technologies that appeared in the 1990s, with the World Wide Web, opened up many new possibilities for both math and reading, but many activities were not designed with the same rigor as the old learning systems.
But increasingly popular today are hybrids that combine self-paced computer-directed learning with noncomputer activities such as reading story books and teachers' observational assessments.
One example that has some promising research results is Scholastic's Accelerated Reader.
And you're right of course about online assessment practice which is more and more common along with online formative assessments. Also, as of 2006-07, students were offered the opportunity to take statewide assessments on the computer in 23 states, so that is an emerging trend. In addition, our survey found that most states offer teachers training on incorporating instructional technology into the classroom.
Andrew Trotter:
An approach generating a lot of interest in the U.S. is to equip teachers with handheld computers that allow them to easily record their observations of students who are reading special grade-level texts. That information, which includes phonemic awareness, is then fed into a database, compared with data from thousands of other students, and used to prescribe strategies to teach reading.
Wireless Generation Inc., in New York, is working with the Montgomery County schools in Maryland, among other school districts on this.
So we are developing a generation of lousy typers with horrific handwriting.
I've heard teachers say typing skill is now up to the family to provide, like driving instruction in many places.
The only saving grace here is that young people are motivated to type fast, if not necessarily properly, in order to chat online. So they may muddle through.
It doesn't have to be so. There a bunch of computer games that are designed to teach typing. And there are cheap electronic keyboards that can be purchased by the classroom set, if a school will only step up to the challenge.
The September 7, 2006 National Academy of Sciences Forum on STEM education drew some 146 leaders, including this writer, from across this nation to address the issue of total inclusion of all: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics in an integrated, holistic, thematic curriculum and not simply the "S&M". AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks says it well: " By 'science', Project 2061 means basic and applied natural and social science, basic and applied mathematics, and engineering and technology, and their interconnections-- which is to say the scientific enterprise as a whole. The basic point is that the ideas and practice of science, mathematics and technology are so closely intertwined that we do not see how education in any one of them can be undertaken well in isolation from the others."
Educational technology should always be labeled as such. It is but one component of "information processing technology" which is but a part of technology and technology education and literacy. So, indeed, Technology Counts. But focus on only one aspect of it is about as useful as focus only on the tires or the transmission of your automobile while ignoring the rest of the system such as highways,bridges, fuel,licenses,proof of competency to drive,oil and lubricants, coolants, filters, brakes which makes safe transportation possible, and in this instance, literacy, possible.When the term edcational technology or information processing technology is dropped and the term technology is substituted, without explanation, you have a major literacy issue.
My concerns arise from my perceptions of how I, as an African-American, and a Latina colleague were treated in a state mandated Technology in the Classroom Training Program. We were the only minorities and received less direct instruction than other participants.
Carole Vinograd Bausell:
Hi Mary. The "digital divide" has been of great concern over the past decade. We know that great progress has been made in access to computers at school. Students of all races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds have close to the same amount of access at school. Access at home is another story though. There are wide disparities based on race and ethnicity, economic background, and parent educational level. How these disparities affect students is something that schools need to consider.
Andrew Trotter:
I'm not sure what the "new" basic skills are, but computers are very good at drilling on reading and math skills.
Being educated today requires much more than basic skills, however, and schools want to tap the broader potential of technology in learning, and to stay relevant to the ways students are accessing information.
The possibilities in vocational education include computer-aided design and computer-controlled lathes, etc. Those activities will prepare students for today's workplaces.
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