Embracing Technology in Learning

Don Ringelestein, Executive Director of Technology at Yorkville CUSD #115

Classroom technology, such as student Chromebooks, smartboards, and iPads, not to mention all of the software and websites in use, is almost ubiquitous. Since the pandemic, most, if not all, public school districts have had one-to-one technology; each student has their own device that they either take home or leave in locker rooms or their classrooms.

I want to make this absolutely clear: classroom technology is beneficial to students and staff. Educating students without technology deployed like this limits students' abilities to use the technology beyond K-12 schools, in universities or in the workplace. Our society is immersed in technology, and we cannot pretend that it isn’t in our schools.

I’ve seen good uses of technology in classrooms. In the first 'one-to-one' district I visited, circa 2014, I saw first-grade students working on projects in groups, using their technology in a context where communication with their peers was critically important to get their work done. It struck me that in the world of work, colleagues work together in an almost identical way. I reflected that these first-grade students were already working together and preparing for a world beyond school, and they were already being exposed to this in first grade.

I’ve seen middle science classrooms where students used hardware probes connected to their devices to collect data, which allowed them to collect data easily in experiments, data that would have been much harder to tease out of experiments without technology. Some of the data they were collecting might not have even been able to be collected without the technological tools they used in class.

I’ve also seen amazing work being done at high schools, especially in career and technical programs that arm students with the skills they need to succeed in fields like advanced manufacturing and engineering. Students in the district I am in now build robots, program control systems for multiple devices, learn how to program computers, use advanced manufacturing equipment and work in an environment that allows them to gain the skills needed to succeed as they venture out into the broader world. Some districts have students working in advanced skills like cybersecurity. In an industry that is critically understaffed, cybersecurity skills are key to success not only in universities but also in the world of work. As passionate as I am about education, in reality, a lot of the students we work with can go on to great careers without continuing education in a university and become contributing members of society after polishing their skills in less expensive and time-intensive programs of study they'd find in a four-year university.

Now, technology isn’t a magic wand. Introducing technology into classrooms isn’t a guarantee that students using it will be mythically transformed. Technology used merely for the sake of using technology isn’t effective. Like anything else, a tool used without a specific purpose simply isn’t useful.

Moreover, some teacher training programs at universities don’t focus on giving educators the skills needed to effectively integrate technology into their classroom practice. For example, the SAMR framework provides measures for technology integration in classrooms through 'substituting'traditional materials like worksheets, ‘augmenting,’ using technology to act much the same way as substituting while adding functional improvement, ‘modification’ where technology allows for significant redesigns of teaching-learning, and to 'redefinition,' where technology allows teachers to design new tasks and lessons that simply wouldn’t be possible without technology. While this framework has been around for some time now, many teachers and administrators aren’t aware of it.SAMR is one of a number of frameworks, but in many cases, teachers must seek these on their own rather than getting crucial frameworks during their education or professional development.

The discussion above has also not intentionally mentioned the incoming wave of either joy or anxiety for K-12 teachers, AI. For many, the court is still out on AI and how it can be used to further or hinder student learning. Among the many concerns about AI is students using it to complete assignments in almost all courses that require writing, from world language to programming classes. I have used AI to help write code (although I didn't turn it in as an assignment!). While some edtech companies suggest that their anti-plagiarism tools can detect AI-written content, the point is that, technically speaking, using AI is not plagiarism. The output from tools like ChatGPT or Google Bard is not plagiarism per se but rather crafted using their training set of data to create original written works entirely. One could suggest that we, as people, do the same, but current AIs are not anything like human intelligence.

Some educators, on the other hand, embrace AI in the recognition that our students are soon going to enter a world beyond school where AI will be an integral part of the workplace and university. There are new lessons that teach how to effectively ask questions of AI to get desired results. Others teach students to detect AI hallucinations or instances in which AIs are clearly wrong or biased. Others are teaching students to use AI to create first drafts of work, which students can then correct and tailor the output using their own intelligence.

One thing is sure. At this point, the availability of AI technology has clearly exceeded society’s capacity to develop ways of using and working with it. Once again, we are all playing catch up to emerging technology, and the future is unclear at this point, whether we embrace or reject AI in schools.

In all, technology, when used well, has been a boon to education. Like any tool, technology can be a tool that can be deftly used to help students learn and grow. Used poorly, technology can be an obstacle to learning. Thus, it is imperative that teachers be well-trained not only in using technology as end users but also to be adept at effectively integrating technology into their classroom practices. Teachers are professionals working in the most important work imaginable; tech can be an invaluable tool to help them do this work.

EdTech