Can Immersive Education Technology Work in American Schools?
Technology has come a long way from when I was in grade school. Back then, the school’s computer (yes, singular) was wheeled between classrooms for short intervals every few days. As of 2009, when the last National Center for Education Statistics study was published on the subject, 97% of classrooms had a computer in them every day with a ratio of 5.3 students per computer.
So it’s no surprise that school districts across the country have started experimenting with more immersive uses of technology in the classroom. What is surprising is how spectacularly many of these tests have failed. The LA school district test is probably the most infamous of the failures, but there are others, and it begs the question — is it possible to give every student a laptop or tablet and achieve positive results?
We Have the Technology
First thing’s first — we no longer live in an age where technology is clunky, expensive, and stationary. It doesn’t take an industrial strength cart to move a single PC from class to class. Today’s tablets and laptops are lightweight, inexpensive, and incredibly powerful (even at the low end). We have the technology to make this work.
The second half of the equation is software. There needs to be a reliable platform with which all those super fast, lightweight devices can be used by students for schoolwork, not Facebook posts and candy matching games.
By most measures, we should have this too. Colleges and Universities have been using tools like Blackboard for years — enabling professors and students to interact easily through a centralized “classroom” online. In grade school and high school, companies like Pearson have been developing detailed frameworks for measuring the effectiveness of education technology in the classroom. Apple has added a number of features to iOS in 9.0 and more recently in the beta for 9.3 that directly address this, including a new classroom app, shared iPad use in the classroom, school manager functionality, and more.
And yet, all of this development hasn’t done much to actually create the fully integrated technological classroom we were promised. In fact, the LAUSD disaster started with a partnership between Pearson and Apple — the two biggest names in this field.
The Challenges of Scale
The technology here is (mostly) good. The devices have reached the point where they can do everything that could be needed in a classroom, and the software is starting to catch up.
So what’s the problem?
It’s about actually scaling these tools to work in a real world classroom. It’s all fine and good to develop a platform that works in theory and build devices powerful enough to implement these technology-driven lesson plans.
But realistically implementing such a plan across the country’s largest school district as was the case in Los Angeles? That’s a whole other matter.
Los Angeles in particular is a good example, because it shows what can go wrong when you don’t plan such a rollout carefully. Not only is there evidence that then-Superintendent John Deasy more or less decided before bidding began that he wanted to work with Apple; the school district didn’t have much of a plan in place for how to roll out the integration of those devices into the classroom.
Teachers who aren’t given ample training, resources, or follow through recommendations are going to have a heck of a time using the technology as it was designed with a classroom full of students.
Contrast that with an experiment that actually did work in Milpitas Unified School District near San Jose.
In 2012, the Milpitas School District didn’t start with the end in mind — rather they evaluated what they wanted the future of education in their classrooms to look like. With a clear vision in mind, they could find both the hardware and software needed to make that vision a reality.
When asked how teachers and students would realistically take advantage of a one-to-one environment, in this case, they decided iPads weren’t yet the way. Not only where they more expensive, they weren’t as flexible as Chromebooks. So the school district bought 2,000 Chromebooks, later increasing that total to 6,000. It worked well because it fit into the model of how those teachers taught. It didn’t force them to adapt.
In LA? They were forced to adapt, and eventually they stopped trying.
In fact, the number of complaints against Pearson and the software that was supposed to drive their digital curriculum grew over time to the point that by March of that school year, only two schools were still using the curriculum at all.
Was it Pearson’s fault or the teachers? There’s no real way to know, but regardless of fault, the software was developed outside the influence of the classroom. It was inflexible, and required thousands of teachers to change how they taught to make it work. That kind of mass adoption is a nightmare, even under ideal circumstances. Throw in hundreds of thousands of students and you have a debacle on your hands.
What We’ve Learned from the Failures
So if we know what doesn’t work, how can we apply that to the future classroom, and can those problems be overcome? First, let’s look at what failed:
• Lack of a Clear Plan — The LAUSD didn’t have a clear plan in place for how devices would be used and how the curriculum they already had would be integrated. Adoption was low as a result and complaints were high.
• Specific Problems to Be Solved — What problems are actually being addressed with the technology? Just having iPads in the classroom because they are cool and modern isn’t enough. What metrics are we using to measure improvement with those devices?
• Where’s the Blueprint — The tool is only as powerful as the instructions for its use and the user’s knowledge. You can’t dump millions of dollars’ worth of iPads in the laps of teachers who have never used them in the classroom before and expect problems to be sparse. We need a blueprint for implementation of the technology.
• Teacher Evangelism Needs to Be High — Let’s face it — if teachers don’t use the technology, it will fail. Teachers need to be well trained, given powerful tools and easy to use software to make this vision a reality. When only 2 out of 245 observed classrooms are still using the technology after only a few months, there’s a problem.
The good news is that this isn’t a permanent problem. People are working on it and solutions are being developed that take the actual situation in the classroom into consideration. The next step then is to build a model that can be scaled effectively across diverse learning settings.
Changing How We Use Ed Tech in the Classroom
This isn’t a new problem. Laptops have been part of the classroom for most of the last decade and no one has really cracked the code yet on how to do it en masse. But there are plenty of pilot programs we can look at that have succeeded in giving children the technology they need in the classroom.
NC State University published a study evaluating 7 such programs in 2011 — all of them 1:1 programs run at the State or County level to determine how effectively the technology could be used.
The results were encouraging. In Michigan, students reported they were better able to do school work and were more interested in what they were studying. Higher engagement was shown among all students in the 7 different studies, but in particular among those considered at-risk or low-achieving. Actual analyses of data don’t show a huge jump in test scores or overall performance, though many students felt they did perform better as a result of having this technology in the classroom.
While there were some mixed results from different counties and states, the consensus and a conclusion in the NC State paper is that three things were needed for a 1:1 initiative to be successful:
• Leadership — Some form of champion was needed in the classroom to drive not only adoption but ongoing coordination of the technology in the classroom. This was helpful not only in keeping teachers engaged and encouraged, but ensuring the proper technical support was available.
• Professional Development — The schools that were not very helpful towards teachers who actually had to implement this technology in the classroom saw less effective use of the technology. Those with better professional development were more effective. Specifically, a study by the Maine Education Policy Research Institute recommended 200 hours of 1:1 professional development over the course of twp years, having seen its positive impact on the rollout in Maine.
• Infrastructure — Schools with an already strong technology infrastructure performed better overall than those who did not have the stable network, adequate bandwidth, and ongoing technical support needed to fully support the initiatives. Lack of technical support in particular was a major obstacle for many of these programs.
In a nutshell, when teachers had support both professionally and technically, and the school district fully bought into and supported the program, it worked better than when the devices were just dropped into classrooms.
The same amount of money was spent but the approach and preparation made all the difference for those schools that saw strong results.
So what needs to change?
There are a lot of factors that will ultimately have a positive impact on the classroom and allow education technology to become a part of how we teach our children.
We have a high access rate in most classrooms with almost any student able to access a computer on a daily basis, but even still it’s not part of the curriculum and teachers, especially those who have been in the field for several years, are behind the curve and don’t have the support they need to really take full advantage of the technology.
Making Ed Tech Work
To really make educational technology work, things need to change. Teachers need to be educated in the use of both traditional curriculum and technology as a supporting resource. Computers are part of our lives and the more we integrate them into the way we teach and learn, the easier it will be to make them part of our children’s educational experience.
Beyond teaching the teachers, our curriculum needs to get better. While there are plenty of fingers to point in the LAUSD failure, the most consistent complaint was over the curriculum provided by Pearson. It was inflexible and plagued by technical issues according to teachers.
It needs to be stronger, flexible to match how different teachers approach the same curriculum, and engaging to keep students and teachers alike interested. More importantly, it needs to be built to actually address problems in the classroom — not to replace everything that is done.
Technology is a tool. It can be extremely powerful, but it doesn’t necessarily replace every component of the classroom and it certainly doesn’t replace the human interaction of a student and their teacher. Like a text book that is brought out as needed, technology needs to play a supporting role and the plans for its use need to take that into consideration.
If companies like Apple with their Classroom app, and Pearson with their Education Infrastructure can adapt to the way the classroom currently uses technology and provide the kind of sandbox platform that they have for the commercial space, then technology will have a much more prominent role in the classroom and we’ll see more stories like the Milpitas Unified School District and fewer like that of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Education Technology can work in the classroom. It just needs to be treated as the tool that it is — when we do that, we’ll have one of the most powerful teaching platforms we’ve ever had.
