The Role of Technology in the Classroom in an Era of Budget Cuts and Globalization

John J. Foley
Fordham University
CTGE 6265 - Emerging Issues in Educational Technology
New Media Blog


The Role of Technology in the Classroom in
an Era of Budget Cuts and Globalization


THE REALITY

Arne Duncan is the Secretary of Education for the Obama administration. In a recent opinion paper he said that 100,000 to 300,000 jobs were at risk of elimination in the coming 2010-11 school year due to economic and budgetary constraints in the U.S. (Duncan, 2010). Mirroring this, the New York Times in an April 21, 2010 article wrote that hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country are expected to lose their jobs this June as a result of the recession. Local school districts are losing funding from within their normal source of revenues - state money and local property taxes. In addition to job losses, school programs are expected to be cut and overall classroom size is expected to increase (Lewin & Dillon, 2010). Unlike in other recessions, the constraints on governmental spending (in this case for education) will not go away when this recession ends. Our budget deficits, and the needed cost cutting activities to address and remediate those deficits, will be with us for a generation.

Adding another factor to our educational concerns, as the Department of Education said in their National Education Technology Plan for 2004, the US will face increasing competition from the global economy, and that today’s American students are not academically prepared to face that challenge. The jobs our educated labor force possess now and in the future could be siphoned off to countries that are academically pressing critical thinking and technology skills in their classrooms.
Taken together, our education system has a double crisis. Not only is our current system cost prohibitive, but at this cost structure we are not producing graduates that have the type or quality of education needed to match industry's demand for the next generation of labor.

As defined, we get to the underlying question posed on this blog: how do you cut back on spending, while also increasing the quality of knowledge and cognition in our graduating students?

IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION, WHILE REDUCING COSTS:
TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY.


First, let's look at the quality of student learning achieved in school environments that use technology to teach, and also the level in those that do not. Amongst other studies, one research study whose purpose was intended to provide effectiveness evaluation for a Technology Innovation Challenge Grant program (Taylor, Casto, Walls, 2007), found that elementary and high school students had notable gains in knowledge when the subject matter was imbedded within a technological context. Those schools using traditional learning styles saw no improvements. The study found that a key issue for successful cognitive gains by students was that the technology had to be structured to provide the learning content in a usable, contextualized format that promoted problem solving learning theory. This is not the same as putting computers on kids' desks and telling them to use it to take quizzes or to write papers. The key ingredient for success was that the teachers integrated the technology into their curriculum, and had the content of the course presented interactively to the students. That critical caveat is not something that teachers are just going to do. They need to be trained about the potential for technology within a properly constructed e-learning environment.

Ok, so best-practices use of technology looks like it has great potential to increase the learning curve for students. What about the cost effectiveness of using technology in teaching? A truism for all labor intensive enterprises in the United States is that all eventually suffer from cost disease – that is, the tendency for wages to rise faster than productivity. We have that situation currently in health care and in education. We once had that problem in our manufacturing industry. Higher labor costs caused much of our manufacturing to go overseas to low cost areas. Manufacturers in the US stopped this flow of manufacturing activity by introducing highly productive capital equipment to augment high cost labor. The result of this remodeling is a current industry that employs highly educated engineers and staff that produce high value-added goods. Yes, we lost the low value-added manufacturing, but those types of jobs do not create the value that supports American prosperity. Low-value jobs generally don't support minimum living standard wages in the U.S. - that's why we target for and plan to have higher-value industries set up in the States. We have been able to do that because we have good school systems that produce critically thinking, high-value workers. The down-side to this is that the type of highly skilled workers and professionals that industry needs is changing, and schools are not keeping up with the technological skill sets needed for the coming generations. The retooling that manufacturing did to produce high value goods with high quality personnel has not yet occurred in education. The US is still producing highly educated students, whom are very prepared for yesterday's jobs, but the cost structure supporting this is still like manufacturing was in the 19th Century - very labor intensive. We have not changed our formula for education because most people belief that the real value of education is the face-to-face transmission of knowledge between a wise teacher and his or her students.

What researchers have shown is that, with the proper use of technology, we can retain the value of these direct interactions with the teacher, while using technology to excite and motivate students toward self-directed learning. The teacher will still be there, but as a facilitator. The students can use technology to run simulations in history, or interact with the computer to problem solve for math equations (how would math anxiety modify if you could interact with the computer to learn, rather than having other students see your confusion?). The potential applications for learning are only limited by the creativity of the software designers. After development, and while all this technology-based learning is going on, school districts would see the per student costs to educate begin to go down, just like it did in manufacturing (Whitaker, 1998). I do recognize that some parents may express outrage in the misconstrued belief that I am comparing the education of their child to making a good widget. I am not; however, the underlying economics are comparable if the focus of the process transformation is to increase the value of what is being molded. I don't think many parents would resist the thought that they and society at large were committed to molding their children into moral and productive citizens. That is the economics and goals that I address.

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) has as its goal the promotion of technology in schools to increase students' learning, while reducing associated costs. One example of the improved learning/lower costs scenario was a pilot program between them and the University of Alabama (this paradigm works at any educational level), where in coordination they created a mathematics center and introduced interactive technology to the students (Witkowsky, 2008). They did not just provide computers for everyone, they changed the methodology of learning from a teacher-centered to a student-centered problem-solving collaborative environment. After the first year the percentage of students getting a C+ or better jumped 10%. The school found that the new student-centered approach of learning using technology was adapted easily by the students, but they found that the teaching faculty was a bit hesitant at the change. In addition to the performance improvements, the redesign caused huge financial savings. Costs per unit to teach students math was $116 before the program. After, unit cost was $83 per student. The school found that one of the hardest things for the teachers was to let go of their teacher-centric pedagogy and assume the role of coach to facilitate the students as they learned on their own.

Proof exists that introducing properly used technology into the classroom reduces the cost of providing a better education; the key to this is to have the conceptual "buy-in" by the teachers and (more importantly) have the teachers train to use the technology effectively.

TEACHING TEACHERS TO USE TECHNOLOGY TO ENHANCE COGNITIVE THINKING IN STUDENTS

Today’s students at any age are generally far ahead of their teachers in computer literacy. Some teachers are progressive enough to rise to the technological challenge. Most are not. The challenge in preparing our children to compete in the global marketplace lay with teachers becoming aware of how computers can be used to enhance the learning environment. So our first goal should be to effectively train educators in how to incorporate learning based technology into the context of their curriculum (U.S. Department of Education, 2004). Computers are in most schools, the challenge is to transform them from a delivery tool (practice tests, tutorials) to true learning tools that assist students in problem solving, showing other contextual perspectives, and in aiding those students to work creatively and collaboratively. Teachers teach the way they were taught when they were in school. They personally know how to use a computer, but not how to integrate the technology into the context of their lesson plan. Teacher mindsets need to be changed through coordinated professional development programs for instructors (Dessoff, 2010).

TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS

When technology is integrated into the lesson plan, classroom practices tend to become student – centered. In order to transform these classrooms, teachers need to take professional development programs for technology, but not in a fashion where teachers leave with just take-away knowledge. They need a program that allows them to examine their beliefs on how they teach, how students learn, what they teach - all in light of the potential for digital learning. A teacher professional development program needs to be flexible enough to allow educators to custom craft their new paradigm to their specific classrooms, but also structured in a way that eliminates teacher isolation. Historically, due to cost and logistics constraints, teachers did not have opportunities to learn from each other. They developed their system of teaching in isolation, based on how they were taught in school. A professional development program for teachers needs to provide a scaffolding of fellow teachers, researchers, administrators, and technology specialists to not only group-design the professional development program, but also provide participants with ongoing collaborative support for years to come (Marx, Blumenfeld & Krajcik, 1998).

For readers to get an idea of how such a professional development plan should evolve, the National Staff Development Council (http://www.nsdc.org/standards/)produced a good guideline for teacher development programs (King, 2002). These guidelines serve as goals and standards qualifiers for a successful professional development program for teachers. These standards address the usual dimensions of context, content and process for staff development, but also emphasize face-to- face learning, problem solving, collaboration, self-directed research, among other facets for a successful program. In fact, the ingredients for a good teacher program development in technology also mirrors the same success factors for effective student learning programs.

I guess the lesson in that is to not change the formula if it works.

References:
Dessoff, A., (2010). Reaching digital natives on their own terms. District Administration, Retrieved June 9th, 2010, from: http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=2380

Duncan, A. (2010) U. S. Department of Education. Keep teachers teaching, students learning, and our economy growing. Retrieved June 7, 2010 from http://www.ed.gov/blog/2010/05/keep-teachers-teaching-students-learning-and-our-economy-growing/

King, K. P. (2002). Educational technology professional development as transformative learning opportunities. Computers & Education, 39, 283-297.

Lewin, T. & Dillon, S. (2010, April 21) Districts warns of deeper teacher cuts. New York Times. Retrieved June,7, 2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/education/21teachers.html

Marx, R.W., Blumenfeld, P.C., & Krajcik, J.S., (1998). New technologies for teacher professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(1), 33-52.

Taylor, L.M., Casto, D. J., & Walls, R. T., (2004). Learning with versus without technology in elementary and secondary school. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, 798-811.

U.S. Department of Education National Education Technology Plan (2004) Toward a new golden age in American education. Retrieved June 7th, 2010, from U.S. Department of Education website: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/index.html

Whitaker, G. (1998). Cost effective use of technology in teaching: challenges and opportunities. Futures Forum 1998 Papers. Retrieved June 9th, 2010, from http://net.educause.edu/apps/forum/ffp98w.asp

Witkowsky, K. (2008). Increasing learning and reducing costs through technology. Change March/April. Pp 33-37.