Jay Mathews writes in the Washington Post that computers, like the billion-dollar iPad purchase in Los Angeles steered by embattled former Superintendent John Deasy, have the power to make us think that technology is doing something good for our schools when, in fact, data that prove such a hypothesis generally doesn’t stack up.
He cites Larry Cuban, now an influential writer at Stanford University and the former superintendent in Arlington, Va.:
There is still no substitute for great teachers, well-trained, motivated and supported by principals. We have to teach students how to use computers, of course. My brother Jim’s public school computer classes in San Mateo, Calif., begin with 4-year-olds. Some teachers have developed creative ways to improve learning with the help of computers and the Internet.
At Alton High School in Illinois, I completed a site visit last week and noticed that all the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors had Chromebooks. Being a state that will use the tests from the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, Illinois districts that provide an iPad or Chromebook for every student have made it easier to test students online. Some burden is thus lifted from the school.
However, the computers have also made it easier for teachers to incorporate lessons from the Internet, and they have modernized, to some degree, the flow of information in class. In Amanda Arment’s English lit class, for example, students respond to a few quick questions before the actual lesson begins. Some of the questions are simple ice breakers, while others get students thinking about the day’s lesson. They type their answers and submit them to the teacher, who can discuss them in class or call on students to explain further.
So, in a sense, computers have made the class time more efficient: no more passing papers to the front of the row, no more teachers collecting papers, no more messy handwriting to read. However, I wonder if teachers who now have to grade essays and other student work online all the time will need better vision care than their health plans provide.
What else computers have done in our schools, though, is to create the need for I/T staff where it didn’t exist previously. It has created a whole new class of employee that schools have to spend money on, a group that does not include teachers, and it has perhaps taken money away from hiring or retaining the good teachers Mr Cuban argues can’t be replaced by machines and sent that money into I/T departments in school districts.
I spoke briefly with Annice Brave about the effect computers have had on classrooms and student learning. Ms Brave is a National Board Certified Teacher and an English teacher at Alton. She was named the Illinois Teacher of the Year in 2011 and was one of four national semifinalists in the year that a Maryland chemistry teacher, Michelle Shearer, was named the National Teacher of the Year.
Ms Brave’s most immediate concern was over eye care for teachers who have to grade several papers online, and her second concern was over the non-teachers schools and districts have had to maintain on staff because of the new computers and other reform efforts.
But it was plain in Alton that the computers had made certain processes, especially quizzes and big statewide testing, more efficient. We can’t say that it has improved student learning, because the jury will be out on those data for a long time to come—probably until the next big reform hits the blogs.
But good teachers will naturally use computers and teach kids how to use them, just as they have been doing since long before the word computer meant anything close to the Chromebooks of today. Ms Shearer wrote, in a May 2011 interview for EDCompass, the following words about teachers using technology:
Technology is, and always has been, a tool that teachers use to enhance instruction in the classroom. When I completed my student teaching almost two decades ago, the height of technology was a VCR, an overhead projector, and a laser disc machine, and I was expected to incorporate this state-of-the-art technology into my teaching!
Technology continues to change around us — our methods for communication have expanded, technological devices enable students with special needs to more fully participate in their academic classrooms, and computers and Internet access make global learning possible for all students. Effective teachers are always searching for strategies and instructional methods to reach underserved subgroups of students, and technology certainly plays a role in achieving that.