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Tech continues to steamroll through the hallways of a school near you.
As smartphones are locked down and locked out of schools, total screen shutdown is the next frontier, which will be challenged and potentially eliminate iPads and tablets from the classroom.
While technology has a valuable role in schooling (we’ll get to this momentarily), experience has given many reasons for skepticism.
The pandemic unleashed a vast new wave of tech enthusiasm. An Education Week survey in 2022 found that two-thirds of districts provided a device (usually a Chromebook or an iPad) to every middle or high school student before the pandemic.
AFICIONADOS
By March 2021, that was up to 90 percent and 84 percent in elementary schools. This was the cause of many celebrations from school leaders and tech aficionados.
Teachers and parents, meanwhile, have been less euphoric. Parents decried the alienating reality of online education and complained about the hassles of balky school websites and software.
As for teachers, sixty percent told Education Week that the biggest problem with technology was distracted students, and 80 percent said that more screen time led to worse student behavior. Moreover, existing research clarifies that drawing any clear relationship between technology and improved learning outcomes is challenging.
Yet, the enthusiasm for technology continues to grow. Schools are hustling to finish spending billions on expired federal pandemic aid, much of it on new technology.
HUCKSTERS
At the same time, ed-tech hucksters and TED talkers wax rhapsodic about the promise of AI, connectivity, and digital tools. This is all playing out amid an urgent push for phone-free schools and a steady drumbeat of data suggesting that phones are bad for kids’ learning and well-being.
Indeed, at schools where phones have been banned, students tell reporters and researchers that they’re thankful for the respite from the constant demands of texting and social media.
The distractions produced by 24/7 access to messaging apps, social media, and games are staggering, mainly when the median teen receives 237! phone notifications daily.
The unbridled enthusiasm for tech spending is due, in no small part, to the incentives that encourage superintendents and school leaders to chase grant dollars and present themselves as “forward-thinking” innovators.
By spending money to acquire cool stuff (whether it gets used or not), they earn fawning coverage and set themselves up for professional advancement.
LUDDITES
A skeptic can’t help but ask: Did the Luddites have it right? Nope, not really. Schools aren’t going back to chalk and slate, nor should they. And even “tech-free” schools aren’t tearing computers out of the library or telling kids to write all their essays by hand.
However, schools need to be far more severe about the uses and limits of technology. While smartphone problems have gotten much well-deserved attention recently, what’s been overlooked is how technology can be unhelpful and corrosive to schooling.
Students have always found ways to tune out their lessons, but sticking an addictive, interactive gateway to gossip and gaming in their pockets doesn’t help. That makes phones (and even Chromebooks and tablets) more disruptive than classroom computers or VCRs a few decades back.
Anyone who has ever taught a class sitting behind open laptops knows the sensation of wondering how many of those students are taking notes — and how many are shopping or perusing social media.
Schools are littered with familiar technologies, such as calculators and whiteboards, that were once somebody’s cutting-edge innovation. These tools proved helpful, meaning high schoolers no longer needed to spend long hours wrestling with slide rules or teachers to endure the daily routine of banging the dust from erasers.
PROGRESSIVES
Of course, these new tools could also be used in troubling ways, as when progressive educators decided that the calculator meant elementary students no longer needed to master multiplication or long division.
Only one technology in schooling has delivered on its transformative promise: the humble book. Once upon a time, students could learn only from local teachers and only when within earshot of them.
The invention of the printing press allowed students to learn anywhere and from anyone.
They could reread passages and learn even when their teacher was unskilled or uninteresting, while teachers could lecture less and explain more.
The problem is that education technology tends to be more about technology than education. But it needn’t be.
MENTORS
Technology can enrich schooling and is used to connect students with mentors, better engage families, provide access to more affluent, more rigorous instruction, and better use student and teacher time.
Don’t underestimate how much parents have influenced the ways schools have gone. From their perspective, they took for granted how they learned when they were kids and only saw that technology was drastically improving their adult/work lives.
The fallacy was thinking a similar principle would apply to their children. It doesn’t happen because human brains wouldn’t evolve into a new learning method in a single generation.
All aboard!
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder/CEO of the non-profit The Student Success Project. He can be reached by email at ritchie@studentsuccessproject.org and on Facebook as The Student Success Project.
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