Using Technology to Teach

Lewis J. Perelman wrote a book that came out in 1992 that was ahead of its time, School’s Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education. He used the success that industry was having in training people with technology and artificial intelligence systems and said that applying it to our children’s education would be very powerful. He asserted that at that time we had the ability to teach anyone, anywhere what they needed to know at an A grade level. An excellent and thought provoking book that is well worth reading.

Education Week has just put out its latest version of Technology Counts which looks at the state of technology-based learning and the use of education technology in the states. They give grades to the states for technology use and Colorado gets a nice shiny D+. Lots of states get A’s; Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, S. Dakota, Utah, and W. Virginia. Another 11 get A- grades.

I have been frustrated for some time about the lack of technology “rollout” to aid teaching and to prepare students to better cope with the increasingly ubiquitous use of technology in our world. I was glad to see that some progress is being made although as always in education it is glacial at best. A quote from the Education Week article, Breaking Away From Tradition, summarizes the situation “As the world of online education continues to evolve, brick-and-mortar schools are incorporating digital curricula and virtual teachers into their classrooms in ways that have surprised even the advocates of the online education movement. Once mostly catering to advanced students who educators believed had the motivation to pursue education online, virtual courses are growing in popularity for struggling students, too. And school districts and teachers that once felt threatened by the surge of online education are embracing the technology, often in a hybrid model that blends face-to-face learning with digital teaching and curricula.”

The dinosaurs still say things like, “Poor-quality online curricula exist in the marketplace, and figuring out how to train and evaluate virtual teachers is still a work in progress.” Of course, they do not mention that poor-quality curricula and poor teachers exist in the traditional education world as well. One area worth emphasizing is that some schools are using the online courses to help both the remedial and the advanced ends of the spectrum. Thus, districts that need to address the low achievement end of their population in an aggressive way, doesn’t have to mean ignoring the advanced end of the spectrum. This is very important because the push to get everyone proficient has taken attention away from the higher achievement end of the spectrum. Oh, there are still gifted and talented programs but the money and manpower goes overwhelmingly toward getting the low achieving kids to grade level.

This problem with under serving the top students is brought home well by comparing the A Nation at Risk report of 1983 with the Tough Choices or Tough Times report of 2007. While the A Nation at Risk report bemoaned the “rising tide of mediocrity” they saw in American education, they were still able to say that America’s best and brightest scored at the top of the heap compared to their international peers. However, the 2007 report stated that in the 24 years between reports our best and brightest had gone from the top of the heap to the bottom of the heap versus their international peers.

PWR 2009