Position Statement on Educational Technology Funding in Elementary Schools
Josh Paluch
University of Florida
June 30, 2009
Take a moment and consider your own use of technology throughout this day, so far. Have you made a telephone call to ask a question of someone who wasn’t in your building at the time? Perhaps you didn’t need an immediate answer, but didn’t want to forget your question, so you sent an email instead? Did you send that email from the computer at your desk or were you on the run sending it from that very same cell phone that you earlier used to make a call. Have you needed to look up any information today? Did you use a book or a computer? What’s the weather going to be like tonight on the ride home? Should you bring an umbrella? I bet you didn’t use an almanac for that one. Where do you get your news? Do you get it from CNN on your television, CNN on your computer, from Twitter on your computer, or do you get it from watching CNN scroll the Twitter feed from their computer to your television? The ways we think about communication, collaboration, news, and even learning are undergoing dramatic changes and technology is making it possible. In fact, many of the uses of technology I just mentioned are examples of informal learning. Imagine the impact ubiquitous technology could have on formal learning!
The point is that Internet and communication technologies and their affordances in both efficiency and effectiveness have so woven themselves into the fabric of our everyday lives that they have become almost transparent to us. We often forget what life was like before these technologies were introduced.
I’m a public school teacher and until recently, it was impossible for me to forget technology progress because I had, effectively, none of these technologies in my classroom. Then in January of this year, our classroom, and my teaching, was transformed over a weekend. When we left on Friday, each classroom had a combination 27” TV/VCR, an overhead projector, and two outdated, barely functional, PCs running Windows ’98. When we arrived on Monday, through programs like eRate and EETT, the T.V. had been removed and replaced with a ceiling-mounted LCD projector capable of displaying a 60” image, which for a large classroom of 25+ students is, easily viewable from either my laptop or the brand-new student computer running Windows XP and capable of supporting any of the most modern software, including audio/video production tools. Additionally, our Media Center had been outfitted with numerous digital and document cameras, portable whiteboard tools, and two 16-computer laptop carts all available for checkout. Just to do my part, I purchased a relatively inexpensive hand-held digital video camera to compliment our technology upgrade.
I’ve always been a teacher who believes what both the research and my own intuition tells me, that students must be creating to be learning. Unfortunately, this style of teaching was not always as efficient as I believed it must be to be practical in my school’s situation. I’m a fourth grade teacher at an amazing, but low-income, Title1 school in Gwinnett County, Georgia. 75% of our students are eligible to receive free/reduced lunches, which means that a typical family of four earns less than $39,220 per year and only about 60% of those families have an Internet-connected computer at home. (Understandably, $39,000 doesn’t leave much for technology purchases.)
Imagine my students’ faces when they walked in on that Monday in January. Imagine what it would be like for you to be given the equivalent of access to an Internet-connected computer, a cell phone, and a digital camera all over one weekend? Would it change the way you work, live, and even learn?
We jumped in quickly and from early on I realized why students in this generation are referred to as “digital natives.” For many of them, it was as though our school and its teachers took on a new level of legitimacy and, correspondingly, they showed a new level of engagement. These technologies didn’t change the way I think about teaching and learning; they made it possible. The writing projects we’d always done for one another now had a potentially worldwide audience. The plays we had previously scripted and performed for other classes in our school, were now viewable by whomever we saw fit via our website. A PowerPoint presentation with a few pictures and perhaps some clipart audio and printed out for distribution was now an online digital movie with narration, background music, and the power to bring its audience to tears with its beauty and sincerity.
After this transformation, and while working diligently to make a tutorial video to teach other students how to use Windows Moviemaker, a project of his own choosing, Carlos said to me, “Mr. Paluch, this is pretty much what we used to do before the new computers, but it’s just more fun.” Engagement and connection to the learning process are conditions that lead to deeper and more meaningful learning.
Technology may become transparent, but it must never be forgotten that, properly integrated, it can be a transformational experience for both teacher and student.
Please continue to fund EETT, by far the most targeted program for educational technology at 2009 levels of $269 million.
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