Technology in Education

Getting computers into the hands of students has become imperative in this time of Coronavirus school closures. Yet according to The Seattle Times, SPS delivered only 1,000 laptops to their nearly 52,000 students. By comparison, just to the south, Highline Public Schools gave out 12,000 to their 20,000 students. SPS officials mentioned that they don’t know which families are without internet or laptops. This is unacceptable. Even Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the United States, is monitoring this. Dahlia Bazzaz of The Seattle Times, writes, “In a 2019 survey of 42 districts in Washington state, many of them large, Seattle was one of six that reported that it didn’t give laptops to students of any grade level.” In one Read More ›

With schools closing throughout the entire nation and families resorting to remote or home schooling, the need for technology as a tool in education is being keenly felt.   It is clear our schools were not ready for the virus. Many districts are sending children home without any education until late April at the earliest. If this is to continue and school is canceled for the rest of the year, children across the nation will miss out on months of education. This pause presents an opportunity to think about how we educate our youth. Specifically, we have not yet seen the technology breakthrough in education that has occurred almost everywhere else in our society. The time is ripe for that Read More ›

The workforce is changing. But K12 schools are not keeping up with the times. As conveyed in EducationWeek, a recent study by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization based in Santa Monica, California, concludes that the workforce is transforming from technological changes, but K-12 schools are stuck in the mud. The article confirms what we have been asserting and is at the heart of our transformation efforts: “K-12 schools are preparing students for jobs using essentially the same set of strategies they’ve been relying on for decades.” Someone once said, “If Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep January 1, 1900, and woke up on January 1, 2000, the only aspect of our society that would be familiar would Read More ›

“Perhaps no change in our society has affected learning more than the advent of computer technology,” says Don Nielsen, Program Chair of the American Center for Transforming Education and author of Every School: One Citizen’s Guide to Transforming Education. How we implement and train on the use of technology within the classroom is an hot topic in education. Nielsen states, “Neither the infrastructure of our schools nor the competency of our teaching corps is keeping pace with this new phenomenon.” (Superintendent Doug Brubaker of Fort Smith, Oklahoma, makes a similar point in a recent Education Week article here. Nielsen states in his updated version of Every School, “Across sectors, adopting new technology is the easy part. Much more difficult is Read More ›

Technology spurs innovation. Innovation improves education. Instead of the teacher being the only source of knowledge in the classroom, students have access to the Internet which fosters student achievement. Here’s why: Learning does not start and end in the classroom, but continues throughout the day as students have access to their teachers’ lesson online, tutoring online, collaboration with other students, and the ability to reach other teachers across the entire world. There is, however, a significant issue stifling the advancement of technology in the classroom: the lack of training. As Don Nielsen states in his book, Every School, “Usually what they [teachers] need is to be trained on what new technology to use and how to use it. Unfortunately, most Read More ›