Why

Why is technology important in education?

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Now that I've got you thinking, it's my turn to contribute.

Technology matters in education because technology is a part of this world and education prepares us for the world. School is a safe place to learn and refine skills, to ask questions, to be wrong and to figure out what's right. Technology is how humans have always interacted with the world (controlling fire and tying rocks to the end of sticks). Today it is more digital than it used to be but the premise remains the same; we must help integrate relevant technology into education. Where do we even start with that? In this design process we can't help without knowing what needs help, and we use a combination of data and anecdotes to find out "why" some educators or schools are struggling with technology.

Data: Survey Analysis

Our class distributed a survey to educators in our networks to complete. From this we acquired specific data on confidence levels of various levels and purposes of technology use in the classroom. As I dug into the data to find common trends and interesting outliers, I stumbled upon a shocking result. See the video below for what I found.

13% of educators responded that students are using technology for creative means. That shocked me. I have to recognize my own personal biases here (I love making things), but barely more than 1 in 8 students are creating documents or media in the classroom. It should be flipped. 7 out of 8 students should be creating documents or media with technology in the classroom, and we should feel terrible about the 1 who isn't. So I found a datapoint that I wanted to address, but I needed more context. I needed to interview an educator who is there day in and day out. So I interviewed the most creative teacher I know, a Library Media Specialist.

Anecdotal Evidence: Teacher Interview

The main takeaway from my interview with the Library Media Specialist is that most professional development for technology is just showing teacher 100 new tools that they can use. Imagine wanting to build a dog house, but you don't know how, and you are shown the latest catalogue of power tools from Home Depot. This leads to an oversaturation of choice, which can lead to defaulting to the known, the tried and true methods of one-to-many delivery of content (banking).

Okay, so "what" are we going to solve?