Do the Benefits Of Digital Devices in Classrooms Outweigh The Downsides?

Technology has steadily worked its way into classrooms around the world, from kindergarten to graduate school. Its use in schools has been strongly supported by the U.S. Education Department, among others, and it is widely viewed as a valuable tool—even a necessity—in education. But its use has critics, as well. They worry about digital devices taking time away from teacher-student interaction, especially in the early school years. And they question how effective technology is in helping students from lower-income families narrow the performance gap in the classroom.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES are as essential to students today as reading, writing and arithmetic were when they were the hot new things in the early 19th century. In addition, technology use in schools is a powerful tool to close the opportunity gap.

There are detractors who say that the introduction of technology into classrooms has failed to meet the high expectations its proponents hoped for, noting correctly that flooding classrooms with computer tablets without productive curriculum plans does not improve educational outcomes and may even hurt students when it leads to overreliance on computers rather than support from teachers.

But that is a shortsighted argument. Shortcomings in the use of technology can be overcome; instances of misuse shouldn’t overshadow the many benefits technology can provide.

Today’s technology is not a magical cure to end education woes, but it is a tool that, when used well, can help us prepare students to succeed in our modern society. We fail our students if we do not teach them how to master the technologies that can support their learning and success in the rest of their lives.

How technology is used is key. When technologies try to replace teachers—especially when they are used like electronic workbooks to drill students on rote skills—research consistently finds no benefit to students.

But there is a burgeoning field of digital technology that is making a difference in many ways: providing support for students with disabilities; sparking greater academic success for atrisk students using it to write more proficiently, understand math problems better and learn through science simulations; and supporting students in their own inquiries into the world around them. Young people are using technology for research and to produce newspapers, projects and websites, as well as to program new apps.

Sometimes that technology enables them to engage in inquiries that address real-world problems with experts and other students around the world.

If there is anything to be concerned about when it comes to technology in the classroom, it is not that there is too much, but that there is a deep inequity in access.

Equalizing access for low-income students is particularly important. While wealthy families can purchase technology as they see fit, lower-income families have far less access to the most up-to-date and useful tools and the bandwidth needed to use them. Schools can help bridge that gap.

With well thought-out approaches, we can use the tools available to help our children learn in new and powerful ways that allow them to fully engage the world around them.

DIGITAL devices have the potential to yield benefits in the classroom, but the way they’re commonly used only exacerbates existing inequalities. A different approach would change that, but there’s no saying when that might happen, and meanwhile the education of many students is suffering.

A study of high-school students in the 36 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found heavy computer use at school had a negative impact on achievement. And a study by the nonprofit Reboot Foundation of American fourth- and eighth-graders showed that the more hours they spent on computers for English-language arts, the lower their reading scores.

Contrary to hopes that technology could help narrow the achievement gap, vulnerable students are the most likely to be harmed by it. The Reboot study found that the gap between the test scores of students who use technology frequently and the higher scores of those who don’t is largest among students from low-income families. Even worse, in many schools serving students from those families, students are more likely to use computers in the classroom— the problem isn’t lack of access to technology, it’s overexposure. In a typical elementary school, the day is divided into reading and math blocks, during which students rotate through learning stations in the classroom. Typically, at least one of those stations requires students to work independently on digital devices.

Even when the subject is math— where the evidence for technology being helpful is strongest—children get distracted more easily in these independent activities. Devices can’t motivate them like a teacher can, and there’s no group discussion. With reading, the prevailing approach prioritizes comprehension skills and strategies, like finding the main idea and making inferences. The theory is that if students practice reading skills on books or passages easy enough for them to read independently, they’ll be able to understand more complex text later.

But that theory is mistaken. Comprehension depends far more on knowledge of the topic than on generally applicable skill. To boost comprehension, schools need to build knowledge through systematic instruction in social studies, science, and the arts. Theoretically, digital devices could build students’ knowledge about any topic. But that would require software grounded in a content-rich curriculum that genuinely adapts to students’ existing vocabulary and knowledge. Instead, our neediest students are getting technology that deprives them of both human connection and a meaningful education.

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Islam finds a home in German classrooms

Half an hour away from Frankfurt—the German city of commerce with shimmering bank towers—Timur Kumlu reads a chapter from the Quran to about 20 second-graders. “Abraham, the first of the Hebrew patriarchs, looked for Allah, the God of Islam, but found him neither in the sun, the wind, nor the moon.” “But who is Abraham?” Kumlu asks. “He trusted Allah!” a boy with piercing dark eyes exclaims as the children jostle for their teacher’s attention. “Good!” says Kumlu. “Now tell me, who is Allah?” “He is God,” says a pale-faced boy. Mr. Kumlu acquiesces. “Allah is also the god of the Jews and Christians, for we have common roots.”

That day at the Henri Dunant School, a run-of-the-mill primary school in Frankfurt—one of the largest cities in the Hessen region, where a third of residents are not born in Germany—a teacher and his students are pioneering something banal yet revolutionary. The students are among the first batch of Muslims in the region to experience something their Catholic and Protestant peers have always gotten; religious instruction in German, from a public teacher, as part of their regular school curriculum.

About six years ago, Hessen became one of the first states in Germany to experiment with teaching Islam in schools along with Christianity, and Timur Kumlu volunteered.

“It’s a matter of recognition,” Kumlu says. Most of the children in his class have roots in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Turkey and Morocco, where Islam is the main religion.

“The kids live in two cultures and don’t know where they belong,” says Kumlu. “They are Muslim, but have little sense of their religion. They ask lots of questions, and they want answers.” Kumlu wants to help children understand their own culture and roots better to prevent them from falling prey to radicalization. The added benefit is that he gets to learn more about his own religion.

To qualify as an Islam teacher, he had to enroll for 18 months of training at the public university of Gießen, near Frankfurt, specially designed for new public teachers of Islam.

“It’s long overdue,” says Dunant School’s Principal, Ulrich Grünenwald, adding that parents—Muslim and non-Muslim—have unanimously endorsed the concept. Grünenwald says it’s important that Mulsim children are taught their religion in German, rather than Arabic or Turkish, and with a curriculum that is under state supervision.

Not just in Frankfurt, but across Germany, except in the five new länder (regions) from the former Soviet East, public schools are now offering some form of Islamic education. Although controversial, the process is widely viewed as necessary as German society becomes increasingly multi-ethnical.

The German government has made efforts to help people engage with its growing Muslim community and weed out Islamic radicalization.

Being a country where religious groups and the state have historically shared deep symbiotic relationships, the government has taken ardous steps to put Islam on the same legal footing as Christianity and Judaism. This involved efforts to extend the same constitutional rights and protections offered to other religions, and incorporating Islam into public school curricula and university disciplines.

In many countries, bringing God into the classroom is considered a taboo. France sees religion as a threat to the sacrosanct laïcité which was established in 1905 to keep the power of the Catholic Church at bay, and has also kept religion out of public institutions, including its école uniques (public schools). On the other hand, the government hands out subsidies to a plethora of private confessional schools.

Germany, however, sees religion as a way of keeping its democracy stable. Enshrined in its constitution, the country’s unique form of church-state cooperation lays out one of the world’s most extensive systems of protecting religious liberties.

“Germany considers religions sociologically and psychologically important and part of both individuals and society,” says Mathias Rohe, head of the Center for Islam and Law in Europe at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria.

“There is an openness towards religions, not only as having their own merits, but also towards contributing to the well-being of society.”

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Australia: Education policy rolls dice

“Both today and 20 years from now, I want Australians to be in control of their future.” At the very least,  Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s vision for the nation is ambitious.

Two decades from now, the children starting school this year will be 25, and their future is massively dependent on how well they are educated.  But the vision for education looks scarily like a roll of the dice.

The next 10 years will be guided by the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, the fourth in a series of road maps signed off by the Federal Education Minister and all states and territories.

Some people will be happy with the Declaration’s recycled, globalist language and experimental proposals for improving student performance.

But statements like: “As the importance of a high quality education grows, so does the complexity of being an educator” offer little evidence of building on solid foundations.

Have quality and complexity only recently become the main game?

As Australian curriculum, assessment, teaching and other standards go steadily downhill, school education is now a $60 billion a year bet that pays off only for some.

Australian policymakers are embracing a 21st century learning agenda that paints the future as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).

This VUCA world was part of the response by the US Army War College to the fall of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The futurists love it, and various interpretations have been adopted enthusiastically by educators as they try to anticipate the needs of the children of the new millennium.

But it’s a dark and pessimistic outlook — fixated on jobs lost to artificial intelligence and other technological trends — and it permeates the work of organisations such as the OECD, whose Future of Education and Skills 2030 Project is influential.

What’s emerging is intellectually and pedagogically shallow, a wholesale shift towards a curriculum focusing on skills that — as per the Alice Springs document —  “support imagination, discovery, innovation, empathy and developing creative solutions to complex problems”… these allegedly being “central to contributing to Australia’s knowledge based economy.”

The vision does at least include the occasional reference to “development of deep knowledge within a discipline … appropriate to students’ phases of development.”

The visionaries cannot have it both ways. A sovereign nation must have an effective, efficient educational agenda.

It is time for our leaders to ensure that all Australian students will benefit from a sophisticated, rigorous education delivered by highly-trained subject experts.  That is what being in control looks like.

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