The National Journal Expert Education blog asks: “In education, how can and should technology be used to close the digital gap rather than exacerbate it? What can policymakers do to help advance the promise of technological benefits in the classroom?”
Chad Wick’s response: Tech Should Support Great Teaching states that “policymakers can achieve great gains in the advancement of the promise of technological benefits in the classroom simply by working to create a more easily accessible and affordable infrastructure for access,” and also points out that technology is most successful in the classroom when it it used to “capture and amplify great teaching.”
Read his full response, and the posts from other national thought leaders in education, at the National Journal Expert Education blog.
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The crux of the Chad’s query comes further down:
“Other obstacles are not quite so tangible. ..”Technology is often seen as a silver bullet in school reform – and we can talk all day long about how it can open up worlds of learning and play a role in the democratization of education. But until we can seriously examine how to move beyond simply transferring text from a printed page to the screen of a device, we will continue to lose ground…
How to move beyond simply transferring text? I’ve been asking for years.
Along the way, we’ve cataloged hundreds of learning interactives. Some great, many not.
They seemed to come in two types: for primary school learners, and for graduate students. Few indeed seemed designed to help the average B student in middle school, high school, or adulthood, to master the content of a good, broad, liberal education.
Take the wonderful works sponsored by PBS circa 2000-2005 (Egypt, for example. These came with great graphics, sometimes innovative navigational strategies, and occasionally game-like or virtual interactivity. Yet the content most always went way too deep. Just far more than the average person would want to know, or could remember. Plus, they were very expensive. Few are still made.
Today, if you search ‘PBS Interactives’, you get these and these. Great for ealy learners, but far different from what PBS was making 8, 10 years ago.
Most people seem to feel that much of their education was spent with one week mastery experiences. You learned stuff just about as long as you could recall an average conversation. That stickiness and repetition for mastery isn’t always there like it should be.
There’s also that capturing of expert teachers. We need software that lets us do that, not just in a short video, but in the repetitive querying and pronouncement that most great teachers exact from their students.