Matthew Cox began his technology presentation Monday with a video of his favorite history teacher, George Feeny from the '90s sitcom "Boy Meets World."
In the clip, Feeny expressed frustration with his students' apparent wasting of the promise of technology.
"Gutenberg's generation thirsted for a new book every six months," Feeny says of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. "Your generation gets a new Web page every six seconds. And how do you use this technology? To beat King Koopa, and save the princess. Shame on you. You deserve what you get."
Cox, who teaches Advanced Placement European History and both general and honors tenth grade U.S. history at Capital High, said he realizes how much power his students - who all now have tablet computers through Kanawha County Schools' roughly $14 million Learning 20/20 initiative - now have at their fingertips, but said what they choose to do with it makes the difference.
Instead of Super Mario Bros., Cox is having students play as slaves escaping through the Underground Railroad in a National Geographic education game. And with a resounding smack, he dropped onto a table before the audience textbooks with hundreds of pages, none of which cover all the information needed for students in his European History class to pass the AP exam to get college credit. Yet with the Apple iPad Airs distributed through Learning 20/20, he can give students supplemental material, including a course from a Yale University professor.
How students and teachers actually utilize the more than 14,000 iPads that Kanawha schools technology director Leah Sparks said were distributed to every middle and high school student in the county last school year will be essential to the county avoiding expensive and high-profile mistakes seen in other school districts that have implemented one-to-one computing, where every student is given a device like a laptop or tablet computer.
"I'm the technology director telling you it has nothing to do with the technology," Sparks said to an audience of about 20 teachers and parents who showed up to a roughly 2-hour information session on the iPads in South Charleston. "It is about the teaching and learning that happens in the classroom using these as a tool."
Education Week has reported on problems with one-to-one computing initiatives in large school systems in other states: California's Los Angeles Unified School District, Texas' Fort Bend Independent School District and North Carolina's Guilford County Schools.
A report released last month by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international group of 34 partner countries, also raised questions about the effectiveness of technology implementation in schools in general.
"Where computers are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed at best," states the report, which analyzed different countries' performance on its Programme for International Student Assessment. "Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics.
"The results also show no appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, mathematics or science in the countries that had invested heavily in (information and communication technology) for education. And perhaps the most disappointing finding of the report is that technology is of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Put simply, ensuring that every child attains a baseline level of proficiency in reading and mathematics seems to do more to create equal opportunities in a digital world than can be achieved by expanding or subsidising access to high‑tech devices and services."
Sparks said Kanawha's Learning 20/20 plan costs about $2.5 million per year for a five-year contract with Apple, though she said the school system was required to use the federal and state funding involved on technology, and said the cost pays for professional development for teachers to use the devices. Bob Calhoun, Kanawha's executive director of elementary education, said the school system is also using the roughly $400,000 from the statewide West Virginia Leaders of Literacy: Campaign for Grade-Level Reading,w to purchase a reading improvement software program called MindPlay and buy about 300 tablet computers for elementary school students to use the software. Elementary students are currently at about a one device to every four students ratio.
Initiatives to put computers in the hands of every student have been around in the U.S. since the mid '90s, according to an overview of 30 studies of one-to-one initiatives published in 2006 in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. A 2012 overview from the University of Kentucky of research on one-to-one computing programs involving only laptops states that one-to-one computing is a "relatively new instructional intervention" and "much more research is needed to the benefits and/or drawbacks of handing every student a robust computing device all day, every day for academic purposes." While the overview notes failures in one-to-one initiatives, it cites many more cases that support the academic benefits.
Scott McLeod, a former University of Kentucky associate professor of education leadership who co-wrote the overview, said technology is just an amplifier of whatever type of teaching is occurring in schools - good or bad. He called the OECD report an "anomaly," saying research has shown technology to have a "tremendous impact" when properly used.
McLeod - now director of learning, teaching and innovation at Iowa's Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency - said schools must prepare students for a digital world, but too often schools with technology resemble what they were decades ago, just with $4,000 smart boards instead of chalkboards and online YouTube videos instead of VCR tapes. He said technology is simply there to foster a different kind of teaching that promotes deeper learning, increased student choice, more student engagement and more real-world work - and without changing the teaching, he agreed the technology could hurt schools.
"If you put a computer in the hands of kids, and then you continue to give them the same boring, disengaging school work they've had for time immemorial," McLeod said. "... they will use it to get away from the boring, disengaging school work."
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