One-to-One Tech Barriers

We leapt into the one-to-one world in the fall of 2010, when my district put a netbook in the hands of every single high school student.

I was excited. The process of trying to get a class into the single computer lab or, worse, use the traveling laptop labcart, was generally frustrating and lacked-- well, a certain spontaneity. I want a world where students always have computers handy, ready to be called into action at a moment's notice.

Some of us went and got us some training. Some of us already had some computer skills. Policies were created, the netbooks were rolled out and, ever since, we have been a technology-linked school where students romp happily through a field of modern educational tech-supported possibilities. Ha! Just kidding. We've wrestled with a bunch of obstacles to one-to-one tech.

I don't present the following as anything but our own specific story; I'm not sure whether we're an outlier or an exemplar. I'm inclined to think a bit of both. But here are the obstacles that stood (and in some cases still stand) in the way.

Student's Deeply Limited Grasp of Tech 

When automobiles first became available, the average owner owned a set of tools and knew how to repair and maintain most parts of the vehicle. The steady development ever since has been in the direction of a car that anyone can own and use without even a rudimentary understanding of internal combustion. That's the usual trajectory of technology, and computers have followed it.

My digital natives for the most part understand how to use their favorite apps, and that's about it. A little over a decade ago, my students knew html and we built websites from scratch. Nowadays, when a question-- any question-- comes up in class, I frequently fall back on the same old refrain. "Gee, if only there were a tool that gave each of us quick and easy access to most of the accumulated information of mankind, where we could quickly locate an answer to that question."

I took computer courses in the seventies in which I learned how to program in BASIC on punch cards. My first home computer was a Commodore64. I am endlessly curious about a zillion things, and the fact that I live in an age where my curiosity can be instantly gratified by the small net-linked computer in my pocket is the third most miraculous thing for which I am thankful (the others would be my wife deciding to marry me and my grandson's existence).

My digital natives think they are carrying small Snapchat machines on which they can play games and watch videos. They literally forget that their computers have other useful capabilities. And when things stop working properly, they mostly don't know what to do about it.

And boy-- if I could just get them to absorb the two main rules of internet use: 1) Everything is forever  and 2) Everything is public. That would be great.

Student Alarm That School and Computers Have Teamed Up

This has gotten better over time, but I'll never forget the initial alarm. I thought students would jump for joy that they could have computers at school, but instead the reacted as if they had come home to find school holding class in their kitchen. The intrusion of school on the cyberspace that they think of as their own did not go well.

In fact, to this day, we have students and families who simply refuse to pick up, use, or take possession of their school-issued chromebook (that's what we're using since netbooks died).

Infrastructure Limitations

I teach in a rural district. Many of my students go home to places that have no internet, either because their families don't care to have it and/or pay for it, or because they live in a place where the internet does not reach. Yes, there are such places in America, and many of my students live in them. That means that our chromebooks are mostly shiny paperweights when the students get home. It also means that one of the great advantages of tech-- to be able to extend school beyond the physical and temporal boundaries of the school day-- can't happen.

Equipment Limitations

In six years, there has never been a class period in which I could say, "Get out your computers and we'll do X" and have every student actually do that successfully. A netbook won't boot up. Another one won't connect to the network. Every year at least one student discovers a new sort of computer malfunction that I have never seen before.

Some of this is students generated. Many of my students treat their computers with the same love and care that they use for their textbooks. And these are teenagers, so even when they mean well, stuff just kind of happens.

Some of it is not the students' fault. Our IT people are pretty good, and they do a good job of keeping our network working. But we are also a public school district in a rural small town area and we surely aren't running out to buy top-of-the-line equipment any time soon.

Either way, my students become hugely frustrated and dismissive of the tech. When I tell them we'll be using the computers for the next unit of work, they are not happy about it. That's partly because of the transparency of technology-- when it works 100 times, you don't really notice, but when it fails on the 101st use, that sticks in your memory.

Nevertheless, I Would Not Go Back 

I have tried to embrace many of the limitations. After all, paper is a fragile medium that requires special storage and maintenance and is very susceptible to all manner of malfunction, but we've just learned to adapt. And filters, firewalls, and constant monitoring are going to be part of my students' lives when they enter the workplace. Learning how to thwart those barriers coexist with limitations is a realistic, if depressing, life lesson.

And with all that, I can still send them on treasure hunts for obscure pieces of information or interesting images. We can pull a piece of writing up on the big screen and group edit it while the author makes changes in real time. We can create completely new types of research projects.

Yes, my students are still slightly tech-reluctant. They will compose an essay on the computer, but they still want to print it out on paper (and I prefer to grade it that way-- I have not yet found a piece of software that allows mark-up as simply and quickly as my pen). And book publishers need not worry; my students remain steadfastly uninterested in reading text in any sort of e-form.

There are things we did right. We didn't have a tight-bound batch of software in place, and we do not have a tightly-defined technology plan in place that tells each teacher exactly what to do with a classroom full of computerized students. That may seem like a mistake, and some teachers weren't happy about it, but it has turned out to be the right choice. Anything that we had adopted six years ago would be outdated and useless today, meaning we'd either be stuck with useless junk, or the school board would be repeatedly dumping funding into a money cyber-pit. Instead, classroom teachers (with the assistance of a district-hired tech coach) have been finding, developing, and honing the stuff that they need for their own teaching. Far better to figure out what tech support will aid you in your teaching than to be told how you must change your teaching to fit whatever tech tool the district bought.

That flexibility has been invaluable. If a teacher asked me about having their school go one-to-one, I'd say absolutely go for it, and do it with lots of resources and no plan. Expect it to be hard. But also expect to find new and interesting mountains to climb.

US Students Lead in Browsing

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is the group that administers that nifty PISA test-- the one that periodically leads to breathless headlines of "Oh Nos!! Our students don't test as well as Estonia!" But the OECD is more than just a test (and attendant PR)-- they've also been taking a look at technology in education.

Back in September they published Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection, a report about the importance of digital learning. If you follow the link, you can order the book, because the OECD apparently has a delicious sense of irony.

The information in the report is from the 2012 cycle of PISA, for which ICT awareness questionnaires were distributed, except not in the US, so there is less information about us in the report than their might be.

Back in 2012, one in five of students in the bottom quartile of income did not have internet at heom. Among the other 75%, only 3% didn't have internet.

Back in 2012, we had one of the lowest student-to-computer ratio in schools among the OECD nations. Pretty sure that this is old news after three years of frantic computer deployment, though it might be interesting to note how many students have access to computers for activities other than taking standardized tests.

But here's an interesting factoid-- our teens are among the world's leaders in web browsing.

No kidding. US fifteen-year-olds were ahead of the OECD average for digital reading. They are better than average at evaluating whether or not a link will lead something useful. And we are below average in the percentage of students who browse aimlessly.

So, yay?

Meanwhile, reporting on their own findings, the OECD demonstrated that (like many folks) they don't really have a clue about what a useful role for technology in education might be.

"School systems need to find more effective ways to integrate | technology into teaching and learning  to provide educators with learning environments that support 21st century pedagogies and provide children with the 21st century skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills. “Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. To deliver on the promises technology holds, countries need to invest more effectively and ensure that teachers are at the forefront of designing and implementing this change.”

The first part of that quote translates roughly to "Blah blah blah jargon blah twenty-first century skills." The second part translates to, "I do not understand the distinction between knowledge and information."

And all of it translates as, "The OECD is either unaware of or prefers not to discuss the body of research suggesting that reading from screens results in less comprehension than reading from paper (here and here and here)." It's all up to debate, but you can't debate what you choose to ignore.

Still-- leading the world in web browsing! Take that, Estonia!

ConnectED to Reality?

The White House fact sheet about the Presidential Plan for Connecting All Schools to the Digital Age is a lovely document. But then, I like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, too, and I will gladly recommend Mervyn Peake's glorious Gormenghast books as well. As with all works of literature, the challenge is in teasing out the connections to reality, and all three of these works present some challenges. But time is short, so let's focus on the ConnectED plan.

First, the challenge:

Driven by new digital technologies, the future of learning is increasingly interactive, individualized, and full of real-world experiences and information. Unfortunately, the average school has about the same connectivity as the average American home, but serves 200 times as many users, and fewer than 20 percent of educators say their school’s internet connection meets their teaching needs. And our teachers do not get enough training and support to integrate technology in their classroom and lessons, despite the fundamental and increasing importance of those skills. 

So many questions here, such as what is meant by saying schools have "the same connectivity." Same bandwidth? Same access to the same internet? I'm not sure. But I'm really wondering about that first sentence-- if being "interactive, individualized, and full of real-world experiences and information" are the future of education, what was in the past? And what about any of those qualities leads us directly to a need for internet technology in schools? Are those features beyond our reach without broadband wifi?

And now, the solution:

Today, President Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to take the steps necessary to build high-speed digital connections to America’s schools and libraries, ensuring that 99 percent of American students can benefit from these advances in teaching and learning. He is further directing the federal government to make better use of existing funds to get this technology into classrooms, and into the hands of teachers trained on its advantages. And he is calling on businesses, states, districts, schools and communities to support this vision.

The sheet focuses on three areas of super-duperosity. And it is nothing if not bold.

First, we're going to get connectivity to 99% of America's students using next-gen broadband and hot wifi in their schools and libraries. As a teacher in a fairly rural school district, I think this would be an awesome thing indeed, but it clearly involves enough detail-based underbrush to hide a million devils.

I should probably take a moment to note that I am completely un-Ludditish in my technoattitudes, and have been one of the most aggressively pro-computer tech guys in my district for a the last two decades. But I don't think tech is magical. I don't over-estimate its capabilities, and I don't under-estimate its challenges.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that people who don't get out of the city much really don't get the tech challenges of rural life. This first goal would inspire me a great deal more if I believed that the feds really knew what they were proposing to do. They do name-check "leveling the playing fields for rural students," but blah blah funds and argle bargle transformative.

Second, the initiative proposes to train teachers so that we can "use technology to help improve student outcomes." Because what good is the internet if it doesn't bring test scores up. The Department of Ed will use existing funding and strategically invest and blah blah blah they want this to happen but they aren't really going to fund it. Thanks, guys.

Third, build on private-sector innovation. Ah, here's the pay-off. The feds are going to transform schools into massive markets for hardware and software. They would like us all to use

feature-rich educational devices that are increasingly price-competitive with basic textbooks and high-quality educational software (including applications) providing content aligned with college-and career-ready standards being adopted and implemented by States across America.

We'll be able to get this stuff from "leading companies" because "a robust market in educational software can unlock the full educational potential of these investments and create American jobs and export opportunities in a global educational marketplace of over $1 trillion." So, again, not so much about educational quality as about opening up markets for corporate sales.

The implication here is that "feature-rich" devices can be used to replace textbooks, and that's a pretty thought. And those devices might well be cheaper than textbooks-- if I were assuming that we had to replace textbooks every two-to-four years. For purposes of price comparison, I will also need to assume that I don't have to pay any license fees for the digital content I'm accessing with my feature-rich device. I'm pretty sure that once we factor in replacement costs and frequency for the devices and add on the license costs for the content, this is not going to be an economic win for schools.

And that's before I even begin to look at whether it's actually a good idea or not educationally. You can look at the early research suggesting that e-reading is not so great as book reading, or you can come talk to my students. We've been a one-to-one school (we give every single student a netbook) for about five years, and they still mostly hate having to read anything on their feature-rich device.

But of course we're not really looking at the educational advantages of this system. Like Kodak confronting digital photography, the book publishers response to their digital competition was both slow and dumb (at one point you could only buy a digital textbook if you would also buy the corresponding number of paper ones). Common Core and the digitizing of American education is supposed to save their bacon, and part of that porcine preservation includes opening some huge markets.

Beware! Falling sky!

Finally, no reformy appeal would be complete without the terrifying news that we are in danger of being internationally outstripped.

Many of our leading competitors are moving forward with aggressive investments in digital learning and technology education. In South Korea, all schools are connected to the internet with high-speed connections, all teachers are trained in digital learning, and printed textbooks will be phased out by 2016. 

Because if there's any culture and country that embodies everything America wants to be, it's South Korea.

Here's a pro tip for racing-- there's no point in chasing somebody if they aren't running in the right direction. There's no reason to get excited about lagging "behind" South Korea is they are in fact running toward the edge of a cliff.

What's the goal?

I am a huge fan of modern tech. I use it without hesitation every time it offers some advantage in pursuing a worthwhile educational goal. I even tolerate the massive level of unreliability that comes with it (in five years I'm pretty sure I've never had a class in which every single student's tech worked as it was supposed to at once).

But if our goal is to be the next South Korea so that we can better fill corporate coffers and, oh yeah, maybe educate some students along the way, then I'm not excited. I am also not excited if what we're really salivating over here is the opportunity to plug students in so that we can collect an ocean of data from each and every one.

Let's use, for instance, the massive bulk buying power of states to get an enormously cheap rate from all of these folks, and let's not just figure that since it's tax dollars at work, we can pay top dollar for all of this technoeduparaphenalia. If we must have a government initiative in this arena, let's have government approach businesses as a representative of public interests, instead of acting as a corporate representative in the business of milking the public interest for all it can.