No Progress?

Liverpool High School is phasing out its use of laptops in its school. This article discusses laptops' inability to increase students' test scores, laptops' common distractions as students use it to download inappropriate websites, and laptops' as a further disturbance since it continuously freezes from so much internet activity. Liverpool's school board president says that in seven years, computers have had no impact on student achievement.

My question is, were they being used appropriately? Were teachers applyng them in useful ways that students would be focused on interesting class material that would not cause them to stray to inappropriate websites?

The president also stated that “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

This idea reflects on a teacher-centered classroom. Students will learn the most material when they are in a student-centered classroom. Students need to be doing all the work--not the teachers. If teachers are "distracted" from outside tools, doesn't it sound like they are lecturing? In ELA, some direct instruction is necessary every once in a while, but most of the work should be hands-on, student-processed work. Technology is not a distraction but an essential aid for students to independently work and learn.

This article from eSchool News discusses the related study mentioned in the above article, where the US Department of Education conducted a study showing how educational software programs did not lead to academic improvements in students.

I found an interesting statement from the article: "Student use of the software accounted for only about 10 or 11 percent of the total instructional time for the entire school year in each of the four experiment groups--well below what the products were designed for. So it's no wonder, ed-tech advocates say, that researchers didn't see any tangible results."

I think teachers see computers as a tool for a mini-lesson, or a tool for vocabulary that they might not want to teach. These are the programs designed on these educational software programs. Students are only active for 10-15 minutes, which is probably only one quarter (at the most) of class time. In order for students to really take something out of computer use, students need to work for long spans of time on projects that require the majority of class time, and additional time spent outside of the classroom on their own computers at home.

However, these projects must be designed appropriately, in ways that we are learning now in ENG307. Renee Hobbs' suggests multiple ideas in her book, and we will get some more great ideas from next week's presentations.

But, we are young teachers who are trained to incorporate technology in our classrooms, so how do current teachers successfully switch to technology in the classroom when they have no sufficient training? I can understand and imagine the intense shift of technology. I can understand the pressure and stress associated with it. I just do not think that they are using them properly in the classrooms, or the programs they are using are not stimulating and/or interesting to the students.

Related to my above comments, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association said, "Brief training at the beginning of the year is not sufficient. Ongoing and sustainable professional development that provides support and mentoring or coaching for teachers ensures that technology tools and resources are used in ways that lead to increased student achievement."

We have an advantage: we are recently trained to implement technology in the classroom. Let's use this to our advantage, and to the students' advantages. We can use what we have learned (and are continuing to learn outside the classroom) in our future classrooms. Students will perform better if we know how to incorporate meaningful and interesting assignments that probe critical thinking. Why not incorporate media literacy? At least students will be interested! They will use necessary ELA skills that are transferrable to the test. This is a win/win situation if we know how to do it right; we just need to master these ideas/skills now before we get in the classroom so that we are able to follow through with our promises when we deliver them to our school districts.