June 2007 — News
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ATTAIN: The Means for a Mandate
Have you ever wondered what the "THE" in THE Journal means? Occasionally? Even fleetingly? No? Well, I'll tell you anyway. It stands for "Technological Horizons in Education." Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Hence the acronym. But that aside, what it indicates is that we take as our premise that technology is inherently beneficial to education--that it can make the lives of educators easier, that it can facilitate learning, and that it can, when approached the right way, stimulate new ideas about learning and the teaching process. (And, as a side benefit, it happens to keep all of you IT folk off the streets.)
For us, this is a given. Education technology, like anything innovative, will lead us in directions we can't even imagine yet. Technology is like pure science in that respect: You create it or implement it, and somebody, somewhere, is going to come up with a breakthrough idea for how to use it to enrich our lives and provide new opportunities with which the next generation can thrive.
But the success of technology in education depends heavily on three factors:
- Thoughtful technology choices;
- Proper implementation;
- And technology leadership to ensure that teachers and students understand the tools available to them and understand at least some of the ways in which those tools can be used to improve teaching and learning.
You and I could probably exchange thousands of examples of how technology has not been implemented or led correctly, how some schools seem simply to be playing catchup with state or district technology requirements. Some schools fulfill technology requirements by teaching typing, as if the whole point of computers in schools were to train the next generation of secretaries. Some schools have a computer lab and require students to create a PowerPoint presentation once a semester. Some simply shift activities that were once done on paper over to electronic media.
But all of these approaches are reductionist in nature and show a lack of vision and leadership and, in some part, a lack of preparedness on the part of teachers to deal with technologies introduced into schools.
But what can be done?
We've seen both the successes and failures of technology in education. We here at THE Journal cover the successes quite often in case studies and news reports. And we use our stable of experts to provide tips and techniques for making the most of technologies available.
But we've also seen some highly publicized failures, in particular the United States Department of Education study released back in March that showed virtually no improvement in student achievement in schools using technology specifically for the purpose of improving student achievement.
But there was something decidedly wrong with that study. The problem was explicit in the data. And it was that those who were using the technologies involved in the study had virtually no training in and no prior experience with those technologies. Teachers expressed a certain level of comfort with the tools in which they were trained, but that comfort level dropped once the teaching actually began.
