Position Paper: Technology and Student Achievement
Technology is the great panacea that it is made out to be for instruction, however, our current educational systems are not effectively utilizing the power of technology for individualization, exploration, collaboration, creativity, and passion. If we shift our values and focus to those of empowering the learner, we will see the shift in learning that many have thought would come just by putting more technology into the classroom. It is paramount for us as teachers to teach the students how to learn. Technology continues to expand its usefulness for students to be able to reach a wider audience and access knowledge that is significant and impactful to the individual’s interests.
At present, there is a vast array of educational technology tools, apps, websites, software, and hardware out there that can greatly enhance learning outcomes when used to their best ability. Some of the most effective technology that we have available benefits students in the areas of collaboration, personalization, knowledge gathering, and the facilitation of real world experiences. Teachers all over the world, who have integrated technology into their classrooms, have seen increases in not only their students learning outcomes, but in their engagement in class and their positive attitudes towards learning.
According to The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the top three qualities that employers are looking for in potential employees, all relate to collaboration. (Adams 2014)
1. Ability to work in a team structure
2. Ability to make decisions and solve problems (tie)
3. Ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization.
Employers recognize that, through collaboration, the amount of knowledge of a group is greater than the sum of the individuals that make up the group. That when teams are working well, individuals draw on the knowledge and ideas of others in the group and are inspired to have ideas or create in ways that they would not have been able to do so on their own. (Robinson & Aronica 2009)
Technology greatly enables and enhances collaboration within a school a school setting. Many, many schools have embraced Google Apps for Education, including Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, and Forms. By February of 2015, Google Apps for Education had over 40 million users (Alhadeff 2015). This is a huge amount of users that, simply through the design of the software, are utilizing collaboration skills and seeing the benefits of working with others on projects. Students who engage in the use of multimedia software and applications generally feel a stronger sense of connectedness to the community, demonstrating greater positive attitudes to the learning process (Lamb & Annetta 2012).
There are also several massively popular video games are not categorized as “educational” by any means, however, they develop collaboration skills through posing simulated, in-depth problems for the players to solve. In the game World of Warcraft, having 12 million plus subscribers at its peak (Statista 2016), forces players to work collaboratively by making certain levels or quests impossible to beat by a single player. At higher levels the quests require raiding parties of eight or more to form to be to conquer the task. The tasks are extremely complicated and require strategic planning and a great amount of communication between the group members who all have specified roles that they are responsible for.
MineCraft, a game with more than 100 million registered users, is almost entirely user created. The game’s creators left ability open for the users to create, rewrite, and develop their own experiences within the game. The incredible success of this game comes from the communities of practice that have organically formed by users of the software to create more and more elaborate and specified worlds, recreations of historic landmarks, and fantastical feats of engineering. The participants learn from and are inspired by each other, taking the game to wherever their imagination wants to go (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder 2002). Educators have understood the motivation factor of the software and have been using MineCraft to enhance learning in math, science, humanities, and even reading comprehension (Wilson 2015; Mojang 2016; Lei 2007).
The personalization of learning that technology can provide is simply unparalleled by what a human teacher with 20, 30, 40 students in a class can do. That is not to say that the teacher is incapable or unnecessary, just that, utilizing certain technologies, a teacher will be able to be much more efficient and effective by receiving data from the software on student understandings or weaknesses and focusing instruction to suit the learner. Using technologies like Kahn Academy, DuoLingo (language learning software), or Prodigy Math Game students are not left with “Swiss cheese learning”, where there are large holes in their understanding of concepts (Kahn 2012). These holes or gaps in learning occur because the class is required to move on to the next concept regardless of whether or not everyone has gained the prerequisite knowledge to tackle the more difficult concept.
Personalization can also occur through allowing students to follow their own passions and interests. Technologies exist currently to help students develop their own learning of what is important to them. For example, students can use media like Twitter, Reddit, FaceBook, or YouTube to find like-minded communities of people that are working towards the same learning goals. Being the only person in the school who is interested in Latin is no longer a barrier to if that student will be able to learn Latin or not. There are various communities to found that will allow a student to follow their interests all with a wealth of knowledge. When there is a lack of an instructor in the local area, students are able to create their own learning through videos, online workshops, or Skype conversations with experts. There groups like EdWeb who focus on creating online seminars or Webinars, run by experts in their specific area, that anyone can join and contribute to the conversation.
To be able to benefit from the vast amount of information on the internet students need to be able to gather that information. Curating of information is something that the internet does extremely well. Apps like Pinterest and Flipboard recognize the user’s areas of interest and bring in more articles, websites, pictures, videos that the user may enjoy. The user can then create their own organization of the information that they find useful or interesting. Pinterest allows people to create what a visual artist would call ‘inspiration boards’. This provides a base for the learner to gather the information that is available, think critically about it, and then create their understanding from the connections that they are able to make. Using Flipboard a teacher is able to find a number of articles related to a particular topic, organize those articles into their own ‘magazine’ and share that magazine with their students to broaden the scope of the content and further the students’ understanding. In essence, this gathering and organizing of knowledge is creating communities of practice in which the learner benefits from the contributions of others (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder 2002).
Lastly, technology facilitates learners to connect with real-world experiences or authentic learning. Students learn more quickly and to a greater degree of depth when they are engaged in real-world related activities (Lombardi 2007). Technology provides the safe and cost-efficient experimental experiences through simulations such as MineCraft, The Mekong e-Sim, or The Sims and it enables students to be informed about and connected to communities and experts outside of their local communities. Technology allows students to immediately publish material to a potentially large audience at any time, about any subject. This has powerful motivational implications. An excellent example of the power of technology to connect learners to the real world is that of Martha Payne, a 9-year-old Scottish girl who was less than overjoyed with the food that was being served to her daily at school. Martha began a blog and each day she takes a picture of her lunch and posts it with her patented rating system, including number of hair found. Martha kept posting and started to gain a following. She started to get pictures of lunches of children from all around the world. Jamie Oliver even posted a comment on her blog and sent her his book with well wishes inscribed inside. The amount of people that were now viewing her blog put pressure on her school to reevaluate their school lunches. But Martha did not stop there. She recognized that she had a voice and she could do some good with it, so she partnered with a charity to raise money to provide suitable food for school children in Malawi. She raised over 130,000 pounds and in 2014 her blog reached 10 million hits. (Payne 2014)
It is clear that it is not for a lack variety and usefulness that technology has not yet reached it’s full potential, redefining education and student achievement and there are a couple of reasons for this. Teacher training, a focus on improving teaching not on improving learning, and an educational system designed for industrialization which fractures learning into subjects.
Public and private schools are pumping big money into technology, buying Smartboards, 3D printers, creating 1-to-1 laptop programs but are struggling to find tech-savvy teachers who are able to effectively integrate the technology into their classrooms. As of now there are no national standards for universities educating teachers on technology, although they are graduating 190,000 plus each year (Barmore 2015). The professional development that teachers do get focuses how to use the devices or tools but often does not demonstrate to teachers what and when technology should or could be integrated to enhance their lessons. The SAMR and TPACK models, two prominent integration frameworks, are both lacking in helping teachers look at their curriculum or lessons and decide what it is they should change (McLeod & Graber 2015)
The focus on ‘teaching and learning’ is trendy to bring up in conversation, however, what is mostly being focused on is the teaching. How do we add this technology in to make our teaching better or more engaging? Instead of, how do students best learn (Richardson 2016)? This comes from the traditional teacher-directed classrooms that have been the norm for centuries and it’s incredibly difficult to change this mindset, but if we shift agency to the learner and focus on supporting them in how and what they want to learn the change will go from incremental to transformational (Kahn 2012; Robinson & Aronica 2009). There are schools and programs out there that are sort of testing the waters, so to speak, as to how this shift will impact how we view learning and possibly school itself.
References
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