Technology and Instruction in Brick-and-Mortar Schools

It begins with access. In 1998 the average public school had one computer connected to the Internet for every 12.1 students, which translates to about two computers per classroom. Just seven years later, in 2005, the ratio had fallen to one Internet-connected computer for every 3.8 students, a threefold improvement.19 By that same year, 94 percent of all public school classrooms were connected to the Internet, up from only 51 percent in 1998.20 Today classroom access to the Internet is near 100 percent. The investment in connectivity has been fueled by the federal E-rate program, which has poured about $2 billion per year into public schools since 1998.²¹ A 1999 survey of technology use in public schools found that one of the main reasons technology was not used frequently for instruction was a lack of computers.²² Today, this is simply not the issue.

The issue is usage. It would be hard to find anyone knowledgeable about technology in schools who would argue it is yet having a major impact on instruction. Elliot Soloway, a professor of computer science and education at the University of Michigan, and someone who has devoted his career to developing computer applications for the classroom, summed it up bluntly: "The honest assessment is [technology] has had very little impact."²³ Students use computers more outside of school than within it. Young people are "digital natives." They know nothing but a world of instantaneous technology—except in the schoolhouse. Outside school, students use laptops, cell phones, MP3 players, and an ever-changing array of devices to communicate and access information and resources. Their purposes may be mostly for socializing and entertainment, but the technological experience is more sophisticated than what they typically have at school. In a recent book on teens and technology, Totally Wired, Anastasia Goodstein observes that technology use at schools is dominated by teacher presentations using PowerPoint and student research using the Internet. Students do not master even the basic productivity tools, such as spreadsheets, and they do not make much use of electronic programs that instruct. ²⁴

Why the slow pace of innovation? It is not a lack of ideas. In the 2007–08 school year public education spent a total of roughly $25 billion on educational materials and technological supports, from textbooks to computing hardware and software to enterprise systems to outsourced tutoring and management services.²⁵ Roughly 20 percent of that spending was on computing hardware and another 20 percent on supplementary instructional programs, most of which are delivered electronically.²⁶ In all, that's a major share of education's external dollars devoted directly or indirectly to uses of technology. By business standards the amount that public education spends on hardware and software is small—less than 2 percent of education's nearly $500 billion cost. But what is being spent has generated a host of educationally innovative technology applications to support core instruction.

Unlike online courses that aim to provide the full content of a traditional class, supplementary programs aim to fill instructional niches. With greater intensity and specificity, they develop skills that students may not grasp fully in a regular classroom. They offer animation and other visual demonstrations that convey ideas differently than what a classroom teacher can provide. They allow instruction to be customized to the needs of the student. They teach skills, such as foreign languages, that regular schools may not be able to afford to provide with live teachers—and they sometimes do it with no teachers at all. Dozens of these programs now exist, and with documented records of achievement. Remedial math and reading programs are the most common. But these programs run the gamut of subjects.

A particularly ingenious online program, Achieve 3000, illustrates the unique potential of technology.²⁷ A challenge that teachers routinely face in teaching any subject that requires students to read—history, civics, or science, for instance—is that students in the same class often have widely varying reading levels. Teachers quickly find that holding a class discussion or asking students to analyze or write about something they have read is undermined by diverse abilities to read. Poor readers never get to show their content knowledge or thinking ability because the written material may be too difficult. Strong readers may be bored by reading material that is too elementary or may become distracted as teachers use class time to assist the stragglers. Achieve 3000 corrects this problem by offering an online library of readings about a host of specific topics, written at every reading level from first grade through high school. More remarkably, the staff at Achieve 3000 writes sets of multiple-grade-level readings about current events every day, and posts them on their Web site every evening. Schools can have discussions of truly current events that every student in a class can readily comprehend. The program can be used in this fashion to support traditional teachers, or it can be used without teachers, as students interact with grade-appropriate readings and test their wits with computerized exercises and assessments. This kind of real-time curriculum and customized instruction would be impossible without technology. It brings benefits to students that traditional classrooms simply cannot.

Examples of technology's unique benefits abound. Reading comprehension is a problem for two-thirds of American students, as we saw in Chapter Two. For many of these students the issue stems from a failure during the primary years to gain fluency—the ability to decode letters and sounds quickly, automatically, and unconsciously into words, phrases, and sentences. Without fluency, students cannot comprehend complex text because the sheer concentration required to decode leaves little mental capacity to think about what is being read. Ideally, schools would catch and remediate these fluency problems during the primary years, before they cripple comprehension. But fixing fluency requires attention to individual decoding issues and lots and lots of practice. Instructional programs have been created to accomplish this, through instruction in very small groups. But this is expensive—requiring lots of teachers—and time consuming. In recent years, technology has provided promising solutions that appear superior to teacher-led approaches.

Programs with brand names, such as Lexia for primary students and Soliloquy for older students, have proven track records of effectively facilitating the decoding and fluency skills so critical to comprehension.²⁸ Students work on computers with headphones and microphones, reading and listening, and carrying out exercises that enable them to work on the skills that are their individual weaknesses. Even small-group tutorials could not match the level of individualization or the frequency of individual practice that the computer offers. Plus the on-screen presentations, with highlighted text and animated exercises, are engaging in ways that only technology can be.

Tens of millions of American students can benefit from this kind of reading instruction. Similar programs, such as ALEKS, provide individualized instruction in math, and the frequent practice necessary to develop automaticity.²⁹ Every student needs to reach a point where reading and math fundamentals are second nature—and every student can benefit from what these technologies have to offer. But some students require even more specialized support to acquire the basics of reading and math. Students with special needs, with learning disabilities, may have challenges in processing information that are more basic than even decoding. They may, for example, have difficulty distinguishing subtle differences in sound. Neuroscientists have identified this issue and technologists have developed software for helping train the brain to make these distinctions. Fast ForWord is the brand name of one such product.³⁰ Used in thousands of schools since the late 1990s, the program is one of the most thoroughly researched instructional technologies on the market, and—as documented by the federal What Works Clearinghouse—has helped tens of thousands of special needs and low-achieving students read.³¹

Neuroscience is gaining insight into how learning occurs, and these insights are being translated into new instructional software. These discoveries and innovations will steadily improve their academic efficacy. To be clear, technology is not some sort of educational panacea. Technology-based instructional programs have been used in schools for nearly twenty-five years. Some widely used programs—such as "integrated learning systems" popular in the 1980s and early 1990s—proved of uneven value at best. But technologies have improved very rapidly in recent years, and the Internet has opened whole new avenues for technology and instruction. It matters little that technology has much to prove about its effectiveness at this juncture.³² In the highly competitive world market in which educational technology is being developed, ineffective products are quickly weeded out and new, more effective products are being introduced daily. There is every reason to believe that technology will only become more effective with time. The same cannot be said of the traditional "technology" of education—teachers and classrooms—unless that world changes fundamentally.