Teaching EdTech Leadership courses
for 2 universities, I receive through interactions with my students a stream of
insights into the state of Education and the progress of the great movement to
apply technology to impact it positively.
My students tend to be early or mid career, practicing
teachers. And while their goal in studying with me is often to qualify
themselves for state certification as School Technologists, I find that, quite
understandably of course, their comprehension of the depth, breadth, and
variety within the field of EdTech is far from complete. This partial
apprehension of the dimensions of EdTech is something I attempt to address
strongly in the courses I teach.
Explaining their goals, many
students verbalize a desire to simply know technology better so that they can
apply it in their own teaching. These folks are invariably core subject based
teachers in math, science or other areas or to move from such a teaching
position to become a school’s Computer or Technology Class teacher.
I understand and agree that in these times of uncertainty
about careers; in choosing EdTech they have selected an area of apparent,
continued growth and importance. However, based on long term observation of the
ways schools are evolving, it’s clear to me that to hold a School Technologist
certificate and position at this period of time, and over the next number of
years in which the Digital Shift plays itself out in our schools, is to assume
a role that potentially will include a significant degree of EdTech Leadership.
Importantly, my students, a group who overwhelmingly teach
in inner city areas, most often in New York City, seem to hold to the view that
the Digital Shift, a situation in which most of a school’s business will be
conducted digitally, exists still as an idea only and that at best, there are
rare schools ‘out there, somewhere’ which have made important progress toward
achieving that state.
Conversely, when I go to the annual ISTE Conference, and to
other gatherings like it that address EdTech, I often find myself in conversations
with individuals whose day-to-day work reality is the opposite. There are, in fact,
a great number of schools in the US who do a very significant amount of their
daily business on a platform that involves small connected devices that access
content and materials and tools from a broad range of sources on the web. And when
the conversation at these gatherings turns to the current state of EdTech in
many of our urban schools, they accept my descriptions, but don’t quite
comprehend how it could still be possible that other schools could so far
behind in the adoption of technology.
So what’s the greater truth here? Is EdTech still a novelty,
an extra, special add-on in our schools? Or is it already, in a very
significant number of schools across the country, the primary platform on which
the school’s business (especially, Instruction) is carried out?
My personal conclusion is that there is a very significant
sub-set of American schools in which the level of technology saturation
(technology available for use in teaching and learning), actual technology use,
and acculturated body of practice that is based on the frequent and favored use
of technology, is high enough to consider that the school has either already
achieved or is close to having achieved what could best be described as a
transformation from the traditional classroom to the 21st Century
Digital Learning Environment.
In understanding all of this we should focus on 2 dimensions of technology’s penetration and impact on our schools: 1) The level of technology available for use in the schools, and 2) The level of technology use in the schools – for their core business, Teaching and Learning, and for the other things that schools do that above all, can be seen as supporting the core business.
Considering available resources, I have included a section below that supports this personal conclusion; if not beyond a doubt, then at least to the level sufficient to illustrate its soundness.
In understanding all of this we should focus on 2 dimensions of technology’s penetration and impact on our schools: 1) The level of technology available for use in the schools, and 2) The level of technology use in the schools – for their core business, Teaching and Learning, and for the other things that schools do that above all, can be seen as supporting the core business.
Considering available resources, I have included a section below that supports this personal conclusion; if not beyond a doubt, then at least to the level sufficient to illustrate its soundness.
However, I want to point out that
the presence of technology itself is NOT indicative of a successful Digital
Shift. For that to happen the technology would have to be actively used as the
prime (or one of the prime) resource types for teaching and learning. Further,
the school would have integrated technology not only into its body of teaching
practice, but also into its culture of teaching and learning. And in that
regard, the ways that technology has and continues to transform the
philosophies and goals of education in the school community would be integrated
along with the technology itself.
As a way to visualize how technology
can transform schools from traditional to 21st Century Digital
Learning Environments, the tables below list defining indicators.
Table
1: Approaches to Instruction / instructional practices indicative of 21st
C. Digital Learning Environments. The table below offers some common
transformational practices indicative of the Digital Shift. These tables might be used as something of a
check list, too, to determine how far along the process of shifting to the new
paradigm a school has moved.
|
Project Based Learning
|
|
From Content Consumer to Student
as Content Creator
|
|
Creativity (in other ways than
simply creating what has been traditionally consume)
|
|
Research
|
|
Collaboration
|
|
Expanded Platform
(beyond traditional, brick and mortar space and time) |
|
Thinking Curriculum (movement of
instructional goals to higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy)
|
|
Student Voice and Choice
|
|
Communication (e.g. writing,
publishing, oral/audio learning products, presentations, etc.)
|
Table II: Transformative Resources to support
the approaches above. What are the characteristics of such digital resources?
|
Media Rich
Content (informational content with interactive elements, video, links, etc.)
|
|
Annotated and
teacher/student ‘processed video’ (teachers and students add to or edit video
to personalize and customize it for teaching and learning)
|
|
Data Driven (resources collect information on which to
make ‘next step’ instructional decisions)
|
|
Interactive –
Students input ideas and preferences and react to content and tools.
|
|
A.I. for Adaptive Learning
(content to changes based on collected data about student needs, interests,
abilities, etc.)
|
Table
III - Resources to support and enable the above
|
LMS (Learning Management System)…
(e.g. Edmodo…)
|
|
Student Data System/Resource(s)
|
|
School Communications Network
(portal, web site, blog, social media, etc.)
|
|
Personal Connected Devices for
Students and Teachers
|
|
Classroom large digital display
|
|
Ongoing Professional Learning
|
|
Digital Learning Resources
|
|
Non-specific resources to support
the above (e.g. security, storage, inventory, bandwidth, etc.)
|
Looking
for a big picture, ‘whole enchilada’ understanding of what’s involved in
bringing schools to, and guiding them through, the Digital Shift, I’ll expand
this body of reflection yet further, beyond The Availability of Technology and
The Level and Type of Use of Technology, to include a new, Transformed Paradigm
of Education that is made possible by the emergence of technology, as well as
shaped by educators and students reactions and responses to it.
(Highly Simplified) Big Picture of
What’s Involved/Required in Schools’ Digital Shift
(Highly Simplified) Big Picture of
What’s Involved/Required in Schools’ Digital Shift
|
Transformed Paradigm of Education - New Understanding Education’s Goals and Teaching and Learning to Address Them
|
|
School
Culture that Embraces Technology
|
|
21st Century Learning
(Instructional Practices and Activities)
|
|
Skill
Set to Support the Use of Technology
|
|
Resources/Infrastructure
|
|
Support
Foundation / NON-instructional practices and resources
|
So… using the reflections and indicators given above, where is your school in relation to The Digital Shift? What do you see happening in the short run? Longer Term developments? What role do you plan to have in making change?
Progress Report on the State of the Digital Platform
While there are sources of data that may give good
indications about the digital state of America’s schools, I don’t believe there
is a definitive report. Here are some ‘bread crumb data points’ which may be
cobbled together to give an idea of the digital state of things…
-
-
34.9M US Students—88 Percent of
School Districts—Now Connected Online
Jan
17, 2017
Analysis: 94 Percent of School Districts Nationwide Meet
Federal High-Speed Internet Access Targets –
94 Percent of all
school districts in the country meet minimum federal connectivity target.
Education Week / September 19, 2017
http://www.govtech.com/network/Analysis-94-Percent-of-School-Districts-Nationwide-Meet-Federal-High-Speed-Internet-Access-Targets.html
http://www.govtech.com/network/Analysis-94-Percent-of-School-Districts-Nationwide-Meet-Federal-High-Speed-Internet-Access-Targets.html
94
Percent Of Teachers Say Students Equate “Research” With Using Google
November 2, 2012 at
8:57 am
It’s almost unanimous: 94 percent of U.S. teachers say their students equate “research” with using Google or other search engines — more so than Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias.
In 2015, 94 percent of children ages 3 to 18 had a computer
at home and 61 percent of children ages 3 to 18 had internet access at home… For
those children who had access to the Internet in 2015, the two locations with
the highest reported levels of internet access were at home (86 percent) and at
school (65 percent), and the two most common means of internet access at home
were a high-speed internet service and a mobile internet service or data plan…
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2018). Student Access to Digital Learning Resources Outside of the Classroom (NCES 2017-098), Executive Summary.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2018). Student Access to Digital Learning Resources Outside of the Classroom (NCES 2017-098), Executive Summary.
More Than 50
Percent of Teachers Report 1:1 Computing
A survey finds that more teachers
have devices in their classrooms than ever before.
https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2017/02/more-50-percent-teachers-report-11-computing
A recent report from Front Row Education shows encouraging progress on the one-to-one computing front. More than 50 percent of teachers now have a one-to-one student-to-device ratio, up nearly 10 percentage points from last year.
A recent report from Front Row Education shows encouraging progress on the one-to-one computing front. More than 50 percent of teachers now have a one-to-one student-to-device ratio, up nearly 10 percentage points from last year.
In 2013, 45% of classrooms in the United States had
implemented IWBs (Interactive White Boards);
although this pales in comparison to the United Kingdom, which doubles that
percentage to 90% (Orbaugh, 2013). The data presented through these statistics
shows a significant increase over the past decade and signifies the relevance
of understanding and analyzing their use in the educational system due to their
rising abundance…
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