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Technology gains come with a warning label
Chemistry teacher Robert St. Clair uses a SMART Board while teaching class Monday, Sept. 8, 2008, at Huntington High School.
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HUNTINGTON -- As schools work to address shortfalls in education, many are adamant that access to technology is crucial for today's students becoming more marketable in the global workforce.
But this comes with a warning, writes Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn in their article, "How Do We Transform Our Schools?," in the Summer 2008 edition of the education journal "Education Next."
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The authors, both with extensive higher education backgrounds, say many states have crammed technology into schools and classrooms and provided minimal training to teachers, resulting in empty computer labs and dusty keyboards.
"... taxpayers, philanthropies, and corporations have spent more than $60 billion to equip schools with computers in just the last two decades. And yet the machines have made hardly any impact," the article states. "As Stanford professor Larry Cuban has documented, computers have merely sustained how schools already operate. Computers typically sit quietly, unused, in computer labs and in the back of classrooms."
Eric Newfeld, a sophomore at Cabell Midland High School, said one of his teachers used a SMART Board -- an interactive, online board -- as little more than a projector last year.
Newfeld said some teachers embrace the use of technology, while others either want to but don't understand how or refuse to adapt.
West Virginia State Schools Superintendent Steve Paine said he's not surprised to hear that. He admitted that one of the state's biggest deficiencies is the amount of professional development given to teachers. Cabell County Superintendent William Smith agreed.
"We are heavily invested in classroom and instructional technology. We have Whiteboards and Elmos and telecommunication capabilities," Smith said. "But the key to the success is the training and support."
Smith said he doesn't want teachers trained on equipment if they don't have it available in their classrooms. He said teachers "must be able to walk into the classroom on the day after training with identical equipment ready to go."
He also said that all of Cabell's schools have a systems operator as well as access to technology integration support, all based upon the foundation that technology is an important tool in the learning process.
Robert Compton, who produced the documentary "Two Million Minutes," said he observed a better use of technology in classrooms in India and China when researching for his film about how high school students in those countries and the U.S. spend their high school careers.
"You can have access to all the technology you want, but if you don't know how to use it, all you're doing is Facebook," Compton said. "In China, they aren't doing Facebook; they're writing the programs."
Huntington High School art teacher Denis Chapman, who taught English for the past 35 years and wanted a change, said teachers do have the ability and are willing to learn new concepts and technologies if it will help children succeed. But, he said, "a SMART Board is not smarter than the person who is using it."
"It goes back to staff development," Chapman said. "Not only time to learn the technology, but time to develop lesson plans around it."
Christensen and Horn go on in their article to say that too many times, teachers are using computers for simple tasks, such as Internet research, typing up reports and multimedia presentations. They also said that some teachers might be using them to present content, but in the grand scheme, computers haven't had the kind of impact education leaders thought there would be.
"... computers have not fundamentally transformed the way learning is accomplished or how the classroom operates," they write. "Computers do not deliver instruction. The teacher is still at the center of the classroom. And research shows that students who have access to computers in school don't necessarily perform better on standardized exams.
"That schools have gotten little back from their investment in technology should come as no surprise. Virtually every organization does the same thing schools have done when implementing an innovation. An organization's natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is the predictable course, the logical course -- and the wrong course."
