In the previous posts, I’ve been discussing financial climates and fundraising opportunities. To help schools, Eduporium is an excellent free option. We offer the entire school community no-hassle access to an Educator Discount on technology from hundreds of vendors. All your school has to do is sign-up.
Why do we do it? We care. We care about supporting schools, students, and families. We care about providing great educational technology to kids. We ….
Hold on. Let’s stop there, and really get to the bottom of “educational technology.” Do we actually need technology in education?
There are widely varying views on this. Teachers in Idaho resist the widespread introduction of computers and on-line classes despite state legislation. On the other end of the spectrum, a school district in Arizona invested $33 million to equip classrooms with laptops, interactive white boards, and educational software. The result? Since the initiative was approved in 2005, district test scores have stagnated even as state scores rose. So where does technology fit in?
My personal opinion?
I get the feeling that the answer of “Is technology needed in education?” is related to “What kind of education should we offer in schools?”. My quick views on education? It depends how you define it, and what goal you are trying to achieve. I think that very many things—many more than are taught in your local school—can be considered “education”. Context is key—there are some professions where knowing a country’s political history would be extremely useful (think diplomacy), others require you to know the basic engineering principles needed to build a house (international development), and yet another will find that if you know how to cook your mother’s traditional lasagna, you’ll achieve an important level of communication with your clients (social care).
We need to have “an” education, but not “the” education. People don’t need to know everything taught in schools in order to reach their goals. I think that schools bundle together those subjects that offer a foundation of useful skills, and historically, the education offered by schools matched the economy. Where there is standardization of products and jobs, there are more schools teaching a specific set of subjects. More and more, however, that isn’t the case now: professions are becoming tailored to serve smaller groups of people, and these groups of people are having more specific needs.
So if that is the state of education and employment, as I see it, do we need technology in education? Yes. If there is an increasing diversity of jobs, there needs to be an increasing diversity in education. If a student would rather give a presentation on Shakespeare by making a video instead of standing in front of the class, it’s not wrong. Who knows, they could become artistic director of a film company? People who have unique skills are the ones who get noticed.
Hence, it’s the little things that count. People do need the opportunity to learn in unique ways. Back 25 years ago, we knew that “80 percent of school children did not learn well in traditional settings” as Albert Shanker highlighted in his 1988 National Press Club speech. But while an individualized education may be a nice ideal, it is not a reality yet. Only 20% of US K-12 public school students are in charter schools, and private schools are not affordable option for many.
What schools and teachers can offer are opportunities to be creative in the subjects that they teach, and they can do this through technology. For this system to succeed, however, the technology itself needs to be diverse—much more than your basic word processor. There also needs to be a discipline, a modus operandi, a set of guidelines for students when they use technology. The Internet has fostered a one-second-answer culture. This is what we need to guard against—and the answer isn’t banning the Internet. If we use technology wisely, we truly can get even better results than were possible in the past. Here are my own personal guidelines for using technology:
Pay attention to details—and try to achieve good depth in a subject or project
Ensure that you have quality information—use directly verifiable sources. Throughout my school and college years, there were specific limits on my use of technology. In papers, I couldn’t cite Wikipedia, for example, and ever since, I look for and read primary sources when I’m trying to understand a topic.
Stick with a tool or application long enough to understand it. If you end up not liking it, you’ll know what to look for next time
Think about how you can change your behavior to get the most out of a technology. Keep learning! We often accuse spell checker (for example) of ruining our spelling and grammar, because we stop learning and just depend on the computer. Next time, when you see a word underlined in red, take a few guesses first. If you still don’t get it, use the spell checker, but then look at the correct spelling for ten seconds. Spell checker is much more efficient than checking your work with a dictionary—even an on-line one. But using it doesn’t mean you have to stop learning!
All of this reminds me about a group of experiments conducted by Sugatra Mitra. Mitra won the TED Prize in 2013 for his work in bringing technology to rural India. Pondering the question of can children learn technology without being taught how to use it, Sugatra Mitra gave a computer to children in slums in India, and left it there. When the first results showed that after three months, children were already teaching each other to use the computer, he took the experiments further. He put articles and data (in English) on the computer to do with advanced biology: DNA replication. Again, he gave it to children, but this time, in small villages, not in cities, where the chance of other people knowing how to use the computer was very small. He expected that the children wouldn’t succeed in understanding the principles of DNA given just this context. Indeed, after three months, the children didn’t learn anything ….... except that “improper replication of DNA causes disease”.
Based on these results, which are rather remarkable in their own right, Mitra argues that give a child access to technology, and they will learn. I think, however, that there were several variables in his experiment that determined its success. He had himself chosen the material to go on the computer, demonstrating that he had, maybe unwittingly, played the part of a teacher. I don’t think that his experiment would have worked as well if he had just asked a question about DNA replication, and left the computer there as a tool to figure it out. Perhaps, Mitra’s experiment shows more how we should be using technology in learning, rather than proving that technology is the key. There may have been a psychological element for the children—it was a challenge.
After they figure out to use the computer, they find something, but they didn’t know what it is. It is exciting! By the time that they have to learn English to read the papers, they may have achieved enough confidence to continue: they had already proven to themselves that they had the perseverance to keep going. Moral of this story? We do need teachers to present resources and information in such a way that children are motivated to explore and learn them. After that, if there’s technology that can make the process faster, so much the better for the children who are hungry for knowledge!