Technology in Schools
It is becoming trendy to be an anti-technology and anti-online program right now in school. Research is out about how online programs haven’t improved outcomes. States are banning cell phones in schools. Districts are wondering how much value all of those Chromebooks and iPads have added. People are scrambling to be the first to write the signature book or column that goes viral that spreads everywhere.
First of all, I completely understand the sentiment. I am at a place where I would like to:
Not spend a cent of the school’s money on online platforms
Fire Chromebooks into the sun
Keep cell phones out of schools
If the extremes are the Mark Zuckerberg “let’s become tech cyborgs owned by me” and the Unabomber, I am much closer to the Unabomber camp than Zuck. But there is a lot of nuance missing.
We have a tendency to massively overcorrect in education.
Can’t you just see a curriculum having some new “certified tech free” label slapped onto it? I recall the phase where “Common Core Aligned” stickers were put onto textbooks with no changes to the content. Literally none!
We are seeing that right now with “Science of Reading” labels. Sometimes by some of the publishers who peddled their damaging material to begin with.
I do not think the solution is to have “no technology in schools ever.” Some can serve a purpose. We just have to figure out what the purpose is.
I’ll start with one question:
“Did the students learn anything from a human being before using this technology?”
That filtering question would reduce Chromebook/iPad/online platform usage by well over 50%. And I think that the number may be much, much higher than that. Like in the 90s.
Online practice does no good for intervention if the student hasn’t been taught it. If I went and practiced a series of exercises about programming a robot to mow my lawn, I would spectacularly fail. Why? Because I know precisely zero about programming lawn mowing robots.
And please spare me that instruction is built into some of these online programs. I’ll wager another guess—the explanations and instruction built into the programs have been read, watched, or listened to, by about 0.001% of students, ever.
Why is that? Because if you want self-sufficient self-paced students, someone has to teach them how to do that too.
In this debate, I am much more in favor of drastically reducing technology. But I don’t want to toss it all out. I want to find its place. I worry that this debate is going to miss the core issue that I see in schools right now:
We need to bring the “teach” part back into being a “teacher.”