In his book Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920, Larry Cuban explores, as you might guess from the title, the use of technology in school classrooms. The idea that technology will revolutionize the classroom is nothing new, and in fact, many contemporary trends have been around for a while. One of these trends, unfortunately, is the relative distribution to access in different schools. Throughout the last century, the majority of technology has been used by the minority of teachers. Some schools had the latest technology, and some schools had the left-overs, in questionable conditions. Sound familiar?
I currently work in a school with incredible access to technology. We have smartboards, overhead projectors that connect to laptops or project what you physically have on the desk, laptop carts, and wifi that has not once gone out while on my watch. Everything works. Really. Ok, sometimes the laptops are a bit slow, or a student has to switch one out for another one that works better. But there are enough laptops on a cart that this it's possible to get another one in the rare scenario that the first one doesn't work. There are enough carts that we've never not had one when we needed one, and there are usually at least two sitting around and charging in the teacher's lounge on my floor. It's possible that other teachers simply don't use the laptop carts very much, which makes sense because they would come in a lot more useful for some disciplines than for others. Still, it goes to show that we have more than enough to go around.
My mentor teacher, and the other teachers that I've observed teaching, all seem quite adept at using their technology. I observed a master math teacher teach a lesson on graphing equations by hand. To compare different types of equations, she used one color for the x-intercepts, a different color for the line of symmetry, and another for the high or low point of the parabola or absolute value function. Using different colors made the similarities between the two types of equations really clear. It would be easy enough to use different colors on a regular whiteboard, but in order to easily go from one picture to the next, she used a projector and wrote on the smartboard using the digital pen. I was impressed with how automatically she switched colors on the smartboard "pen", cleared her writing to get back to the original picture, and shifted back and forth between slides. It was clear that the technology made her lessons easier for the students to understand, but only because the teacher had practiced using it to the point of automaticity. This is something I observe in my mentor teacher as well, and in all the teachers I've seen. They don't just have access technology; they can use it "fluently", like speaking a second language without difficulty.
This is all good news for my placement school. However, this simply isn't the case in other schools. In the school I used to work in, a teacher was considered foolish if their lesson depended on the internet working. The tech guy was working on fixing the internet or other tech problems so often that I didn't even realize until months into the school year that he also taught classes. When I first got back to the States and started this Teaching With Technology class, I felt like a Negative Nancy but I couldn't help asking "And when the wifi goes out?" every time we were introduced to a convenient yet internet-reliant tool to use in our classrooms. As I can tell by reading my classmates' blogs, this is clearly not an issue of the States versus other countries. My current placement seems to be an exception when it comes to access to working and reliable technology. Even within a single school district, such as the one I went to school in, disparities arise.
It's clear that the technological divide, already evident many decades ago, is not abating. It's hard to say if it's becoming starker or not, but that seems to be the wrong question. The most imperative questions are: what is the current situation, what are the results, and what can we do about it? More and more it is becoming clear to me that teaching my students to the best of my ability, while absolutely essential, is not enough. As teachers, we must be advocates for our students, and for students in general. After all, students are not just our "clients" or our "products" as some models seem to posit. They're not our "future" as many a feel-good song tells us. They are the current generation of young people; they are Now.
I currently work in a school with incredible access to technology. We have smartboards, overhead projectors that connect to laptops or project what you physically have on the desk, laptop carts, and wifi that has not once gone out while on my watch. Everything works. Really. Ok, sometimes the laptops are a bit slow, or a student has to switch one out for another one that works better. But there are enough laptops on a cart that this it's possible to get another one in the rare scenario that the first one doesn't work. There are enough carts that we've never not had one when we needed one, and there are usually at least two sitting around and charging in the teacher's lounge on my floor. It's possible that other teachers simply don't use the laptop carts very much, which makes sense because they would come in a lot more useful for some disciplines than for others. Still, it goes to show that we have more than enough to go around.
My mentor teacher, and the other teachers that I've observed teaching, all seem quite adept at using their technology. I observed a master math teacher teach a lesson on graphing equations by hand. To compare different types of equations, she used one color for the x-intercepts, a different color for the line of symmetry, and another for the high or low point of the parabola or absolute value function. Using different colors made the similarities between the two types of equations really clear. It would be easy enough to use different colors on a regular whiteboard, but in order to easily go from one picture to the next, she used a projector and wrote on the smartboard using the digital pen. I was impressed with how automatically she switched colors on the smartboard "pen", cleared her writing to get back to the original picture, and shifted back and forth between slides. It was clear that the technology made her lessons easier for the students to understand, but only because the teacher had practiced using it to the point of automaticity. This is something I observe in my mentor teacher as well, and in all the teachers I've seen. They don't just have access technology; they can use it "fluently", like speaking a second language without difficulty.
This is all good news for my placement school. However, this simply isn't the case in other schools. In the school I used to work in, a teacher was considered foolish if their lesson depended on the internet working. The tech guy was working on fixing the internet or other tech problems so often that I didn't even realize until months into the school year that he also taught classes. When I first got back to the States and started this Teaching With Technology class, I felt like a Negative Nancy but I couldn't help asking "And when the wifi goes out?" every time we were introduced to a convenient yet internet-reliant tool to use in our classrooms. As I can tell by reading my classmates' blogs, this is clearly not an issue of the States versus other countries. My current placement seems to be an exception when it comes to access to working and reliable technology. Even within a single school district, such as the one I went to school in, disparities arise.
It's clear that the technological divide, already evident many decades ago, is not abating. It's hard to say if it's becoming starker or not, but that seems to be the wrong question. The most imperative questions are: what is the current situation, what are the results, and what can we do about it? More and more it is becoming clear to me that teaching my students to the best of my ability, while absolutely essential, is not enough. As teachers, we must be advocates for our students, and for students in general. After all, students are not just our "clients" or our "products" as some models seem to posit. They're not our "future" as many a feel-good song tells us. They are the current generation of young people; they are Now.
Your posting reflects a most honorable stance as an educator, Noemi, and it also foregrounds some really important questions about technology. The introduction of technology into schools, and a greater stress on its importance, runs a real risk of deepening already existing inequality in schools. Of course, there’s also the possibility that leveraging it intelligently could have a more salient effect, and I want to hold out hope for that. We’ll continue to explore questions in this domain next term.
ReplyDeleteThanks for a thoughtful post, Noemi.