Technology and Today’s Learners
Use of Technology in School
As we attempt to address the different circumstances that exist in different classrooms, it is important to recognize that the availability of equipment does not determine whether students actually work with the equipment. It is possible that equipment could sit unused in the back of the classroom or computer laboratory.
Let’s approach this matter in the following way. How heavily do K-12 students use technology and what roles does technology play in the education process? These questions must be linked. To draw a comparison, one might ask how heavily do K-12 students use books and what roles does a textbook serve. Most of us would probably agree, even without knowing the exact amount of time committed, that students spend a considerable amount of time reading textbooks and we might surmise this is because textbooks serve as one of several sources of information students are expected acquire and one of several methods for guiding student thinking about this information. Would we be shocked if we learned that students spend 15 minutes per week working with a textbook? When we wrote the 5th edition of this textbook in 2006, we reported data from 2003 indicating that 59% of students spent less than 15 minutes per week in curricular use of technology (Norris, Sullivan, Poirot & Soloway, 2003). We have no current survey data using this precise method of asking about the amount of use, but there are still data indicating that many students make limited use of technology. One such study determined that students in 43% of elementary classrooms and 29% of secondary classrooms spend less than 10% of class time using technology (Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership, 2010). Of course 10% of class time would be far more than 15 minutes per week and students make use of technology during school hours outside of class, but it would seem fair to still conclude that technology is not well integrated in many settings. A related survey conducted by the Department of Education (Gray, Thomas & Lewis, 2010) indicate that 26% of elementary teachers and 41% of secondary teachers say they rarely or never engage students with technology during “instructional time”. If you noticed that the two studies seem to reach different conclusions regarding grade-level differences in usage, we also find this a curious inconsistency. Perhaps we can conclude that there has been some increase in the amount of time students spend with technology, but the experience varies from school to school and the general level of use may be less than many would assume.
The proposal that how students use technology may explain changes in how much time is involved might be illustrated in some other data from this same source. It seems that more widespread educational use of the Internet has increased in that 66% of teachers report their students sometimes or often use technology to “conduct research” and 31% “corresponded with others”. What might be regarded as “traditional” learning activities also are implemented with technology; 69% of students sometimes or often are reported to learn or practice basic skills with technology and 61% of students sometimes or often prepare written text. Still, to those of us accustomed to looking up information or corresponding with others on the Internet and writing on a computer, even these numbers may be surprising. For example, these data would imply that nearly 40% of students do not regularly compose using technology. In preparation for some of the topic that follow, we also note that as part of their learning experiences 9% of students sometimes or often contribute to a blog or wiki, 25% conduct experiments or perform measurements, 25% create music, art, movies, or webcasts, and 42% develop multimedia presentations (Gray, Thomas & Lewis, 2010). Again, it is difficult to determine what an optimal level for given activities would be or to know what teachers mean when they claim students sometimes are involved in a given activity. However, these data do seem to indicate that there is some interest among teachers in involving students in the type of generative activities we will emphasize at a later point.