technology in education history timeline

The Evolution of Technology in the Classroom

Technology has always been at the forefront of human education. From the days of carving figures on rock walls to today, when most students are equipped with several portable technological devices at any given time, technology continues to push educational capabilities to new levels. In looking at where educational methods and tools have come from to where they are going in the future, technology’s importance in the classroom is evident now more than ever.

A History of Classroom Technology: The Primitive Classroom

In the Colonial years, wooden paddles with printed lessons, called Horn-Books, were used to assist students in learning verses. Over 200 years later, in 1870, technology advanced to include the Magic Lantern, a primitive version of a slide projector that projected images printed on glass plates. By the time World War I ended, around 8,000 lantern slides were circulating through the Chicago public school system. By the time the Chalkboard came around in 1890, followed by the pencil in 1900, it was clear that students were hungry for more advanced educational tools.

• Radio in the 1920s sparked an entirely new wave of learning; on-air classes began popping up for any student within listening range.
• Next came the overhead projector in 1930, followed by the ballpoint pen in 1940 and headphones in 1950.
• Videotapes arrived on the scene in 1951, creating a new and exciting method of instruction.
• The Skinner Teaching Machine produced a combined system of teaching and testing, providing reinforcement for correct answers so that the student can move on to the next lesson.
• The photocopier (1959) and handheld calculator (1972) entered the classrooms next, allowing for mass production of material on the fly and quick mathematical calculations.
• The Scantron system of testing, introduced by Michael Sokolski n 1972, allowed educators to grade tests more quickly and efficiently.

The pre-computer years were formative in the choices made for computers in the years following. Immediate response-type systems (video, calculator, Scantron) had become necessary, and quick production of teaching materials, using the photocopier, had become a standard. The U.S. Department of Education reports that high school enrollment was only 10% in 1900, but by 1992 had expanded to 95%. The number of students in college in 1930 was around 1 million, but by 2012 had grown to a record 21.6 million. Teachers needed new methods of instruction and testing, and students were looking for new ways to communicate, study, and learn.

The Entrance and Significance of Personal Computers

Although the first computers were developed in the ‘30s, everyday-use computers were introduced in the ‘80s. The first portable computer, in 1981, weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. When IBM introduced its first personal computer in 1981, the educational world knew that it was on the verge of greatness. Time magazine named The Computer its “ Man of the Year ” in 1982, and aptly so: the foundation of immediate learning capabilities had been laid. Time declared, “it is the end result of a technological revolution that has been in the making for four decades and is now, quite literally, hitting home.”

• Toshiba released its first mass-market consumer laptop in 1985 (the T1100), and Apple’s infamous Mac (which later evolved into the Powerbook) was available starting in 1984.
• In 1990, The World Wide Web was given life when a British researcher developed Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML, and when the National Science Foundation (NSF) removed restrictions on the commercial use of the Internet in 1993, the world exploded into a frenzy of newfound research and communication methods.
• The first Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) were released by Apple Computer Inc. in 1993, and with that, computers were a part of every day, if not every moment. By 2009, 97% of classrooms had one or more computers , and 93% of classroom computers had Internet access. For every 5 students, there was one computer. Instructors stated that 40% of students used computers often in their educational methods, in addition to interactive whiteboards and digital cameras. College students nowadays are rarely without some form of computer technology: 83% own a laptop, and over 50% have a Smartphone.

The Future of Technology in the Classroom

It seems like years since MySpace, first introduced in 2003, Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2007) have changed both the communication and business worlds. Instant connectivity has branched out from merely a tool of personal communication, to a platform for educational instruction and outreach. Social media is now being recognized as an accepted form of instruction in some instances, and groups such as Scholastic Teachers provide excellent support and tips for instructors. Many instructors use social media to communicate directly with their students, or to form forum-style groups for students to communicate with each other, and the method seems to be proving valuable in providing one-on-one attention to student’s questions and concerns.

With the classroom having already evolved into a hotbed of technological advances such as learning robotics , what can the future possibly hold that could further educational proficiencies even more?

• Biometrics, a technology that recognizes people based on certain physical or behavioral traits, is on the technological horizon. The science will be used to recognize the physical and emotional disposition of students in the classroom, altering course material to tailor to each individual’s needs based on biometric signals.
• A second up-and-coming technology is Augmented Reality (AR) glasses , rumored to be on Google’s release list, and this technology could be a whole new world for education. AR Glasses (or even contact lenses) will layer data on top of what we naturally see, to allow for a real-world learning experience. For example, a student wearing AR Glasses could potentially sit at his desk and have a conversation with Thomas Edison about invention. It was Edison, after all, who said that “Books will soon be obsolete in schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye.”
• Multi-touch surfaces are commonly used through equipment such as the iPhone, but the technology could become more relevant to education through entirely multi-touch surfaces, such as desks or workstations. This could allow students to collaborate with other students, even those around the world, and videos and other virtual tools could be streamed directly to the surface.

Educators and the Evolution of Technology in the Classroom

With the evolution of technology, educational capabilities are growing and changing every day. The Internet is a vast electronic library of information, and both research and instruction can be achieved through a click of the mouse. With these advances come new responsibilities to the instructor and therefore increase the value of a Master of Science in Education in Learning Design and Technology. As technology advances, an educator’s abilities will grow by leaps and bounds, and without the knowledge of these changes and capabilities, an instructor has a good chance of being left behind.

A career in education requires hard work and dedication, but, for the diligent educator, can prove very rewarding. For those who are serious about success in the education field, staying well-informed of current and changing technologies is imperative. As the world of technology evolves, the learning environment, both on-campus and online, will equally progress, and the need for teachers who are educated in technology and design will continue to grow.

Learn more about the online MSEd in Learning Design and Technology at Purdue University today and help redefine the way in which individuals learn. Call (877) 497-5851 to speak with an admissions advisor or to request more information.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section History of Technology Integration in Education

Introduction, thematic overviews.

• Chronological Overviews
• Influential Works
• Historic Debates
• Historical Learning Theory Influences
• Historical Role of Computers in the School

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History of Technology Integration in Education by Marie Heath , Andrea H. Parrish LAST REVIEWED: 24 September 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 24 September 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0256

This entry identifies key works which both summarize the history of educational technology in the 20th and 21st centuries and identify major influences in the field. Educational technology as a field is influenced by educational psychology and instructional design, and follows a similar epistemological and ontological trajectory as these fields. Thus the history of the field can be understood chronologically and thematically. This entry identifies works that provide both types of overviews of the history of educational technology. It furthermore includes works that are often considered foundational to the field, including historical debates which continue to influence policy, practice, and research.

One way to conceptualize the field of educational technology is by tracing the historical trends within the field in order to examine the impact of philosophical and psychological perspectives. Ely 2008 takes this approach to offer a brief overview of educational technology in the 20th century. Ertmer and Newby 2013 and Schuh and Barab 2008 also frame changes in educational technology pedagogy within larger shifts in educational psychology. Koschmann 1996 attempts to organize the history of the field through paradigms of technology and educational psychology. Chapters within Duffy and Jonassen 2013 review the field using similar frameworks as Ertmer and Newby 2013 . Selwyn 2016 emphasizes the role of society in impacting the field of technology and educational technology.

Duffy, T. M., and D. H. Jonassen, eds. 2013. Constructivism and the technology of instruction: A conversation . Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis.

Edited book which includes both overviews of educational technology within philosophical and psychological perspectives and chapters on effective technology use and instructional design to support constructivist learning. In particular, the book explores the student-centered aspect of constructivist learning through educational technology. The chapters providing overviews grounded in psychological perspectives are particularly useful for developing a historical understanding of educational technology.

Ely, D. 2008. Frameworks of educational technology. British Journal of Educational Technology 39.2:244–250.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00810.x

Journal article tracing historical trends in educational technology. Useful to contextualize the field and provide broad overviews.

Ertmer, P. A., and T. J. Newby. 2013. Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. In Special issue: Research update on key training and mentoring topics . Edited by Karen Medsker. Performance Improvement Quarterly 26.2:43–71.

DOI: 10.1002/piq.21143

Article examining historical trends in educational technology and instructional design within the contexts of psychological perspectives of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.

Koschmann, T. 1996. Paradigm shifts and instructional technology . In CSCL: Theory and practice of an emerging paradigm . Edited by T. Koschmann, 1–23. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

A historical analysis of educational technology as paradigm changes. Examines technology changes and uses them as the frames for the paradigms. Then examines paradigm changes through frames of psychological perspectives. Useful for graduate students.

Schuh, K. L., and S. A. Barab. 2008. Philosophical perspectives. In Handbook of research on educational communications and technology . Edited by J. M. Spector, M. D. Merill, J. van Merrienboer, and M. P. Driscoll, 67–82. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Book chapter that traces the historical pedagogical trends in educational technology and aligns them with broader philosophical and psychological perspectives and learning theories. Especially helpful for exploring the underlying ontology and epistemology of pedagogy. Useful for scholars and graduate students.

Selwyn, N. 2016. Education and technology: Key issues and debates . 2d ed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

A critical evaluation of the historical trends in technology in education. Especially focuses on social issues and the nonneutrality of technology. Useful for educators, scholars, and graduate students.

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Chapter 6: Understanding technology in education

6.2 A short history of educational technology

Arguments about the role of technology in education go back at least 2,500 years.  To understand better the role and influence of technology on teaching, we need a little history, because as always there are lessons to be learned from history. Paul Saettler’s ‘ The E volution of American E ducational T echnology ‘ (1990) is one of the most extensive historical accounts, but only goes up to 1989. A lot has happened since then. Teemu Leinonen also has a good blog post on the more recent history (for a more detailed account see Leitonen, 2010). See also: The Evolution of Learning Technologies .

What I’m giving you here is the postage stamp version of ed tech history, and a personal one at that.

6.2.1 Oral communication

One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral – though human speech – although over time, technology has been increasingly used to facilitate or ‘back-up’ oral communication. In ancient times, stories, folklore, histories and news were transmitted and maintained through oral communication, making accurate memorization a critical skill, and the oral tradition is still the case in many aboriginal cultures. For the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means by which people learned and passed on learning. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were recitative poems, intended for public performance. To be learned, they had to be memorized by listening, not by reading, and transmitted by recitation, not by writing.

Nevertheless, by the fifth century B.C, written documents existed in considerable numbers in ancient Greece. If we believe Socrates, education has been on a downward spiral ever since. According to Plato, Socrates caught one of his students (Phaedrus) pretending to recite a speech from memory that in fact he had learned from a written version. Socrates then told Phaedrus the story of how the god Theuth offered the King of Egypt the gift of writing, which would be a ‘recipe for both memory and wisdom’. The king was not impressed. According to the king,

 it [writing] will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on what is written, creating memory not from within themselves, but by means of external symbols. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow men.

Phaedrus, 274c-275, translation adapted from Manguel, 1996

I can just hear some of my former colleagues saying the same thing about social media.

Slate boards were in use in India in the 12th century AD, and blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn of the 18th century. At the end of World War Two the U.S. Army started using overhead projectors for training, and their use became common for lecturing, until being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational software such as Powerpoint around 1990. This may be the place to point out that most technologies used in education were not developed specifically for education but for other purposes (mainly for the military or business.)

Although the telephone dates from the late 1870s, the standard telephone system never became a major educational tool, not even in distance education, because of the high cost of analogue telephone calls for multiple users, although audio-conferencing has been used to supplement other media since the 1970s.  Video-conferencing using dedicated cable systems and dedicated conferencing rooms have been in use since the 1980s. The development of video compression technology and relatively low cost video servers in the early 2000s led to the introduction of lecture capture systems for recording and streaming classroom lectures in 2008. Webinars now are used largely for delivering lectures over the Internet.

None of these technologies though changes the oral basis of communication for teaching.

6.2.2 Written communication

The role of text or writing in education also has a long history. According to the Bible, Moses used chiseled stone to convey the ten commandments in a form of writing, probably around the 7th century BC. Even though Socrates is reported to have railed against the use of writing, written forms of communication make analytic, lengthy chains of reasoning and argument much more accessible, reproducible without distortion, and thus more open to analysis and critique than the transient nature of speech. The invention of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century was a truly disruptive technology, making written knowledge much more freely available, very much in the same way as the Internet has done today. As a result of the explosion of written documents resulting from the mechanization of printing, many more people in government and business were required to become literate and analytical, which led to a rapid expansion of formal education in Europe. There were many reasons for the development of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the triumph of reason and science over superstition and beliefs in Europe, but the technology of printing was a key agent of change.

Improvements in transport infrastructure in the 19th century, and in particular the creation of a cheap and reliable postal system in the 1840s, led to the development of the first formal correspondence education, with the University of London offering an external degree program by correspondence from 1858. This first formal distance degree program still exists today in the form of the University of London International Program. In the 1970s, the Open University transformed the use of print for teaching through specially designed, highly illustrated printed course units that integrated learning activities with the print medium, based on advanced instructional design.

With the development of web-based learning management systems in the mid-1990s, textual communication, although digitized, became, at least for a brief time, the main communication medium for Internet-based learning, although lecture capture is now changing that.

6.2.3 Broadcasting and video

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting educational radio programs for schools in the 1920s. The first adult education radio broadcast from the BBC in 1924 was a talk on Insects in Relation to Man, and in the same year, J.C. Stobart, the new Director of Education at the BBC, mused about ‘a broadcasting university’ in the journal Radio Times (Robinson, 1982).   Television was first used in education in the 1960s, for schools and for general adult education (one of the six purposes in the current BBC’s Royal Charter is still ‘promoting education and learning’).

In 1969, the British government established the Open University (OU), which worked in partnership with the BBC to develop university programs open to all, using a combination originally of printed materials specially designed by OU staff, and television and radio programs made by the BBC but integrated with the courses. Although the radio programs involved mainly oral communication, the television programs did not use lectures as such, but focused more on the common formats of general television, such as documentaries, demonstration of processes, and cases/case studies (see Bates, 1985). In other words, the BBC focused on the unique ‘affordances’ of television, a topic that will be discussed in much more detail later. Over time, as new technologies such as audio- and video-cassettes were introduced, live broadcasting, especially radio, was cut back for OU programs, although there are still some general educational channels broadcasting around the world (e.g. TVOntario in Canada; PBS, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel in the USA).

The use of television for education quickly spread around the world, being seen in the 1970s by some, particularly in international agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO, as a panacea for education in developing countries, the hopes for which quickly faded when the realities of lack of electricity, cost, security of publicly available equipment, climate, resistance from local  teachers, and local language and cultural issues became apparent (see, for instance, Jamison and Klees, 1973). Satellite broadcasting started to become available in the 1980s, and similar hopes were expressed of delivering ‘university lectures from the world’s leading universities to the world’s starving masses’, but these hopes too quickly faded for similar reasons. However, India, which had launched its own satellite, INSAT, in 1983, used it initially for delivering locally produced educational television programs throughout the country, in several indigenous languages, using Indian-designed receivers and television sets in local community centres as well as schools (Bates, 1985). India is still using satellites for tele-education into the poorest parts of the country at the time of writing (2015).

In the 1990s the cost of creating and distributing video dropped dramatically due to digital compression and high-speed Internet access.  This reduction in the costs of recording and distributing video also led to the development of lecture capture systems. The technology allows students to view or review lectures at any time and place with an Internet connection. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started making its recorded lectures available to the public, free of charge, via its OpenCourseWare project, in 2002.  YouTube started in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006. YouTube is increasingly being used for short educational clips that can be downloaded and integrated into online courses. The Khan Academy started using YouTube in 2006 for recorded voice-over lectures using a digital blackboard for equations and illustrations. Apple Inc. in 2007 created iTunesU to became a portal or a site where videos and other digital materials on university teaching could be collected and downloaded free of charge by end users.

Until lecture capture arrived, learning management systems had integrated basic educational design features, but this required instructors to redesign their classroom-based teaching to fit the LMS environment. Lecture capture on the other hand required no changes to the standard lecture model, and in a sense reverted back to primarily oral communication supported by Powerpoint or even writing on a chalkboard. Thus oral communication remains as strong today in education as ever, but has been incorporated into or accommodated by new technologies.

6.2.4 Computer technologies

6.2.4.1 computer-based learning.

In essence the development of programmed learning aims to computerize teaching, by structuring information, testing learners’ knowledge, and providing immediate feedback to learners, without human intervention other than in the design of the hardware and software and the selection and loading of content and assessment questions. B.F. Skinner started experimenting with teaching machines that made use of programmed learning in 1954, based on the theory of behaviourism (see Chapter 2, Section 3 ). Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based learning. There has been a recent revival of programmed learning approaches as a result of MOOCs, since machine based testing scales much more easily than human-based assessment.

PLATO was a generalized computer assisted instruction system originally developed at the University of Illinois, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. PLATO was a highly successful system, lasting almost 40 years, and incorporated key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.

Attempts to replicate the teaching process through artificial intelligence (AI) began in the mid-1980s, with a focus initially on teaching arithmetic. Despite large investments of research in AI for teaching over the last 30 years, the results generally have been disappointing. It has proved difficult for machines to cope with the extraordinary variety of ways in which students learn (or fail to learn.) Recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience are being watched closely but at the time of writing the gap is still great between the basic science, and analysing or predicting specific learning behaviours from the science.

More recently we have seen the development of adaptive learning, which analyses learners’ responses then re-directs them to the most appropriate content area, based on their performance. Learning analytics, which also collects data about learner activities and relates them to other data, such as student performance, is a related development. These developments will be discussed in further detail in Section 6.7.

6.2.4.2 Computer networking

Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol in 1982. In the late 1970s, Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz at the New Jersey Institute of Technology were experimenting with blended learning, using NJIT’s internal computer network. They combined classroom teaching with online discussion forums, and termed this ‘computer-mediated communication’ or CMC (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). At the University of Guelph in Canada, an off-the-shelf software system called CoSy was developed in the 1980s that allowed for online threaded group discussion forums, a predecessor to today’s forums contained in learning management systems. In 1988, the Open University in the United Kingdom offered a course, DT200, that as well as the OU’s traditional media of printed texts, television programs and audio-cassettes, also included an online discussion component using CoSy. Since this course had 1,200 registered students, it was one of the earliest ‘mass’ open online courses. We see then the emerging division between the use of computers for automated or programmed learning, and the use of computer networks to enable students and instructors to communicate with each other.

The Word Wide Web was formally launched in 1991. The World Wide Web is basically an application running on the Internet that enables ‘end-users’ to create and link documents, videos or other digital media, without the need for the end-user to transcribe everything into some form of computer code. The first web browser, Mosaic, was made available in 1993. Before the Web, it required lengthy and time-consuming methods to load text, and to find material on the Internet. Several Internet search engines have been developed since 1993, with Google, created in 1999, emerging as one of the primary search engines.

6.2.4.3 Online learning environments

In 1995, the Web enabled the development of the first learning management systems (LMSs), such as WebCT (which later became Blackboard). LMSs provide an online teaching environment, where content can be loaded and organized, as well as providing ‘spaces’ for learning objectives, student activities, assignment questions, and discussion forums. The first fully online courses (for credit) started to appear in 1995, some using LMSs, others just loading text as PDFs or slides. The materials were mainly text and graphics. LMSs became the main means by which online learning was offered until  lecture capture systems arrived  around 2008.

By 2008, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in Canada were using web technology to create the first ‘connectivist’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a community of practice that linked webinar presentations and/or blog posts by experts to participants’ blogs and tweets, with just over 2,000 enrollments. The courses were open to anyone and had no formal assessment. In 2012, two Stanford University professors launched a lecture-capture based MOOC on artificial intelligence, attracting more than 100,000 students, and since then MOOCs have expanded rapidly around the world.

6.2.5 Social media

Social media are really a sub-category of computer technology, but their development deserves a section of its own in the history of educational technology. Social media cover a wide range of different technologies, including blogs, wikis, You Tube videos, mobile devices such as phones and tablets, Twitter, Skype and Facebook. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein (2010) define social media as

a group of Internet-based applications that …allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content, based on interactions among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.

Social media are strongly associated with young people and ‘millenials’ – in other words, many of the students in post-secondary education. At the time of writing social media are only just being integrated into formal education, and to date their main educational value has been in non-formal education, such as fostering online communities of practice, or around the edges of classroom teaching, such as ‘tweets’ during lectures or rating of instructors. It will be argued though in Chapters 8, 9 and 10 that they have much greater potential for learning.

6.2.6 A paradigm shift

It can be seen that education has adopted and adapted technology over a long period of time. There are some useful lessons to be learned from past developments in the use of technology for education, in particular that many claims made for a newly emerging technology are likely to be neither true nor new. Also new technology rarely completely replaces an older technology. Usually the old technology remains, operating within a more specialised ‘niche’, such as radio, or integrated as part of a richer technology environment, such as video in the Internet.

However, what distinguishes the digital age from all previous ages is the rapid pace of technology development and our immersion in technology-based activities in our daily lives. Thus it is fair to describe the impact of the Internet on education as a paradigm shift, at least in terms of educational technology. We are still in the process of absorbing and applying the implications. The next section attempts to pin down more closely the educational significance of different media and technologies.

Activity 6.2 What does history tell us?

1. What constitutes an educational technology? How would you classify a recorded lecture from MIT that is accessed as an open educational resource? When is a technology educational and not just a technology?

2. An early version  of the Internet (Arpanet) existed long before 1990, but the combination of Internet protocols and the development of html and the World Wide Web were clearly a turning point in both telecommunications and education (at least for me). What then makes the Internet/the Web a paradigm shift? Or are they just an evolution, an orderly next step in the development of technology?

3. Is writing a technology? Is a lecture a technology? Does it matter to decide this?

4. The more sharp eyed or analytical of you may be asking questions about the categorization or definition of some of the technologies listed above (quite apart from the issue of how to deal with people as a means of communication). For instance computer-mediated communication (CMC) existed before the Internet (from 1978 in fact), but isn’t it an Internet technology? (It is now, but wasn’t then.) How do social media differ from CMC? Does it make sense to distinguish television technologies such as broadcast, cable, satellite, DVDs or video-conferencing, and is this relevant any more? If so, what distinguishes them and what do they have in common from an educational perspective?

These are some of the issues that will become clearer in the following sections.

 References

Bates, A. (1985)  Broadcasting in Education: An Evaluation  London: Constables

Hiltz, R. and Turoff, M. (1978) The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer Reading MA: Addison-Wesley

Jamison, D. and Klees, S. (1973) The Cost of Instructional Radio and Television for Developing Countries Stanford CA: Stanford University Institute for Communication Research

Kaplan, A. and Haenlein, M. (2010), Users of the world, unite! The  challenges and opportunities of social media, Business Horizons, Vol.  53, No. 1 , pp. 59-68

Leitonen, T. (2010) Designing Learning Tools: Methodological Insights Aalto, Finland: Aalto  University School of Art and Design

Manguel, A. (1996) A History of Reading London: Harper Collins

Robinson, J. (1982) Broadcasting Over the Air London: BBC

Saettler, P. (1990) The Evolution of American Educational Technology Englewood CO: Libraries Unlimited

Selwood, D. (2014)  What does the Rosetta Stone tell us about the Bible? Did Moses read hieroglyphs? The Telegraph , July 15

Teaching in a Digital Age Copyright © 2015 by Anthony William (Tony) Bates is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Our Mission

Technology Integration: A Short History

Learn how technology has changed education and how educators can leverage new educational tools to personalize learning, encourage collaboration, and prepare students for the future.

What does a well-equipped classroom look like in the 21st century? Few would deny that it needs to include technology tools for teaching and learning. But which tools? How should teachers use them to best serve the needs of a diverse group of learners? Should we set any limits on access? And how might the use of these tools reshape teaching practices?

Questions about technology integration persist, even after more than half a century of research documenting the use of technologies such as television and the benefits of using computers for learning. But for students who have grown up in a digital world, there's no debate. They're already active users of technology outside of school. The challenge is leveraging the opportunities technology creates to prepare learners for a globally connected, information-saturated world.

Where the Vision Begins

Seymour Papert , a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among the first to recognize the potential of technology to fundamentally change the learning enterprise. During the 1960s, after collaborating with renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, Papert developed the Logo programming language and began introducing it to children. Designed to be simple enough for those who do not yet have sophisticated mathematical understanding, Logo enabled students to use the computer to take control of their learning environment. With minimal instruction, they were able to write -- and debug -- programs that controlled the movements of a turtle robot. They not only gained deeper understanding of geometry concepts along with programming expertise but also showed an engagement in learning that's rare in more traditional, drill-and-practice classroom activities.

In a 1970 interview with Computer Decisions, Papert said, "With computers, there is a substantially bigger chance that you can lead the child with less effort into something he really likes doing. . . . The intersection with the set of fun things with the set of educational things is sufficiently big so that you should be able to keep every student internally motivated."

Since Papert's groundbreaking work, the tools available for learning have become increasingly powerful and widespread. At the same time, barriers to using technology have steadily diminished. Today's learning landscape includes an almost dizzying array of tools, from inexpensive personal computers and handheld devices to interactive whiteboards, digital video cameras, and a constantly expanding suite of Web 2.0 tools. Disparities persist between technology-rich schools and those that have limited access to outdated equipment. But after a decade-long effort to expand access and close the digital divide, nearly every public school in the United States has been connected to the Internet, making it possible to connect students to the world.

Benefits Galore -- Potentially

A substantial body of research has documented a range of benefits for learners when all this technology is integrated effectively into instruction. Research scientist Harold Wenglinsky, looking at math achievement scores in a 1998 Educational Testing Service study , found positive benefits for educational technology, as long it was used for challenging activities such as simulations. Using computers to drill students on fundamental skills, in comparison, had a negative impact on achievement. Researchers have determined that, when used for more ambitious learning goals rather than basic skills, technology can help students develop higher-order thinking skills, creativity, and research abilities.

In a 2000 report, a team from SRI International identified four ways that technology enhances how children learn: It offers active engagement, the opportunity to participate in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connections to real-world contexts. Technology also expands what students can learn by providing them with access to an ever-expanding store of information. Yet the same researchers (Roschelle, Pea, Hoadley, Gordin, & Means) emphasized that merely making computers available does not automatically lead to learning gains. They described technology integration as only one element in "what must be a coordinated approach to improving curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher development, and other aspects of school structure."

According to learning-science experts, the increasingly interactive nature of technology, exemplified by Web 2.0 tools, creates new opportunities for students to learn by allowing them to do a task, receive feedback on it, and then build new knowledge. In How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School , authors John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking explain that technology can be used to advance learning by

• bringing exciting curricula based on real-world problems into the classroom
• providing scaffolds and tools to enhance learning, such as modeling programs and visualization tools
• giving students and teachers more opportunities for feedback, reflection, and revision
• building local and global communities that include teachers, administrators, students, parents, practicing scientists, and other interested people
• expanding opportunities for teacher learning

Social Media and Collaboration

Today's technology tools also support what experts understand about the social nature of learning. "Technology resources for education . . . function in a social environment mediated by learning conversations with peers and teachers," explain Bransford and his colleagues.

Social media opens new possibilities for connecting learners and taking education in new directions. Digital gaming, simulations, and social networking, for example, offer opportunities "to convey concepts in new ways that would otherwise not be possible, efficient, or effective with other instructional methods. In other words, these technologies don't just help us teach the old stuff in new ways -- they can also help us teach new stuff in new ways," report MIT researchers Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, Jennifer Groff, and Jason Haas in their paper "Using the Technology of Today, in the Classroom Today."

Although schools have been slow to bring social media into the classroom, many students are using digital tools on their own to create and publish content, connect with acquaintances, and pursue their own interests. The book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out summarizes three years of study about kids' informal learning with digital media. The authors found that kids use these tools to extend friendships, navigate the challenges of adolescence, and pursue self-directed learning, sometimes in great depth.

New Demands on Learners, Teachers

Becoming literate in the 21st century puts new demands on learners to be able to use technology to access, analyze, and organize information. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) updated its National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS) in 2007 to better describe the skills needed to learn and live in an increasingly digital world. "The ISTE Standards for Students" now includes creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration, research and information fluency, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and digital citizenship along with technology operations and concepts.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills lays out a similar vision in its framework. "To be effective in the 21st century, citizens and workers must be able to exhibit a range of functional and critical-thinking skills such as information literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy," states the organization.

Teachers also need to develop new understanding to capitalize on the learning potential of technology. In a report for the foundation Cable in the Classroom, James Marshall found that educational technology "complements what a great teacher does naturally. . . . With ever-expanding content and technology choices, from video to multimedia to the Internet, there's an unprecedented need to understand the recipe for success, which involves the learner, the teacher, the content, and the environment in which technology is used."

Teachers who don't make regular use of classroom technology, Wenglinsky and other researchers have consistently found, lack experience using it. With in-depth, sustained professional development in technology integration, teachers are more likely to bring technology into teaching and learning.

The latest National Education Technology Plan, "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," was released in November 2010 by the Department of Education. It outlines a vision "to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures. In contrast to traditional classroom instruction, this requires that we put students at the center and empower them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several dimensions."

The plan also calls for "connected teaching" in which educators connect to "resources and expertise that improve their own instructional practices and guide them in becoming facilitators and collaborators in their students' increasingly self-directed learning."

Although the tools have changed dramatically since the early days of educational technology, this vision of using technology for empowered, self-directed learning has remained constant -- and consistently hopeful.

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A third theme to emerge from this review of the history of technology is the growing importance of education. In the early millennia of human existence, a craft was acquired in a lengthy and laborious manner by serving with a master who gradually trained the initiate in the arcane mysteries of the skill. Such instruction, set in a matrix of oral tradition and practical experience, was frequently more closely related to religious ritual than to the application of rational scientific principles. Thus, the artisan in ceramics or sword making protected the skill while ensuring that it would be perpetuated. Craft training was institutionalized in Western civilization in the form of apprenticeship, which has survived as a framework for instruction in technical skills. Increasingly, however, instruction in new techniques requires access both to general theoretical knowledge and to realms of practical experience that, on account of their novelty, were not available through traditional apprenticeship. Thus, the requirement for a significant proportion of academic instruction has become an important feature of most aspects of modern technology . This accelerated the convergence between science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries and created a complex system of educational awards representing the level of accomplishment from simple instruction in schools to advanced research in universities. French and German academies led in the provision of such theoretical instruction, while Britain lagged somewhat in the 19th century, owing to its long and highly successful tradition of apprenticeship in engineering and related skills. But by the 20th century all the advanced industrial countries, including newcomers like Japan, had recognized the crucial role of a theoretical technological education in achieving commercial and industrial competence.

The recognition of the importance of technological education, however, has never been complete in Western civilization, and the continued coexistence of other traditions has caused problems of assimilation and adjustment. The British author C.P. Snow drew attention to one of the most persistent problems in his perceptive essay The Two Cultures (1959), in which he identified the dichotomy between scientists and technologists on the one hand and humanists and artists on the other as one between those who did understand the second law of thermodynamics and those who did not, causing a sharp disjunction of comprehension and sympathy. Arthur Koestler put the same point in another way by observing that the traditionally humanities-educated Westerner is reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond comprehension but will cheerfully confess to not understanding how a radio or heating system works. Koestler characterized such a modern individual as an “urban barbarian,” isolated from a technological environment that he or she possesses without understanding. Yet the growing prevalence of “black-box” technology, in which only the rarefied expert is able to understand the enormously complex operations that go on inside the electronic equipment, makes it more and more difficult to avoid becoming such a barbarian. The most helpful development would seem to be not so much seeking to master the expertise of others in our increasingly specialized society as encouraging those disciplines that provide bridges between the two cultures , and here there is a valuable role for the history of technology.

A fourth theme, concerned with the quality of life , can be identified in the relationship between technology and society. There can be little doubt that technology has brought a higher standard of living to people in advanced countries, just as it has enabled a rapidly rising population to subsist in the developing countries. It is the prospect of rising living standards that makes the acquisition of technical competence so attractive to these countries. But however desirable the possession of a comfortable sufficiency of material goods, and the possibility of leisure for recreative purposes, the quality of a full life in any human society has other even more important prerequisites, such as the possession of freedom in a law-abiding community and of equality before the law. These are the traditional qualities of democratic societies, and it has to be asked whether technology is an asset or a liability in acquiring them. Certainly, highly illiberal regimes have used technological devices to suppress individual freedom and to secure obedience to the state: the nightmare vision of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), with its telescreens and sophisticated torture, has provided literary demonstration of this reality, should one be needed. But the fact that high technological competence requires, as has been shown, a high level of educational achievement by a significant proportion of the community holds out the hope that a society that is well educated will not long endure constraints on individual freedom and initiative that are not self-justifying. In other words, the high degree of correlation between technological success and educational accomplishment suggests a fundamental democratic bias about modern technology. It may take time to become effective, but, given sufficient time without a major political or social disruption and a consequent resurgence of national assertiveness and human selfishness, there are sound reasons for hoping that technology will bring the people of the world into a closer and more creative community.

Such, at least, must be the hope of anybody who takes a long view of the history of technology as one of the most formative and persistently creative themes in the development of humankind from the Paleolithic cave dwellers of antiquity to the dawn of the space age. Above all other perceptions of technology, the threshold of space exploration on which humankind stands provides the most dynamic and hopeful portent of human potentialities. Even while the threat of technological self-destruction remains ominous and the problems of population control and ecological imbalance cry out for satisfactory solutions, man has found a clue of his own future in terms of a quest to explore and colonize the depths of an infinitely fascinating universe. As yet, only a few visionaries have appreciated the richness of this possibility, and their projections are too easily dismissed as nothing more than imaginative science fiction . But in the long run, if there is to be a long run for our uniquely technological but willful species, the future depends upon the ability to acquire such a cosmic perspective, so it is important to recognize this now and to begin the arduous mental and physical preparations accordingly. The words of Arthur C. Clarke , one of the most perceptive of contemporary seers, in his Profiles of the Future (1962), are worth recalling in this context . Thinking ahead to the countless aeons that could stem from the remarkable human achievement summarized in the history of technology, he surmised that the all-knowing beings who may evolve from these humble beginnings may still regard our own era with wistfulness: “But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.”

Arguments about the role of technology in education go back at least 2,500 years.  To understand better the role and influence of technology on teaching, we need a little history, because as always there are lessons to be learned from history. Paul Saettler’s ‘The Evolution of American Educational Technology’ ( 1990 ) is one of the most extensive historical accounts, but only goes up to 1989. Stephen Downes ( 2012 ) picks up from there with a short history of e-learning from around 1989 up to 2012. Martin Weller ( 2020 ) follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has influenced each year from 1994 up to 2019. What I’m giving you here is the postage stamp version of ed tech history going back 2,500 years. I have deliberately selected the history to demonstrate how each new medium in particular has influenced educational practice.

7.2.1 Oral communication

One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral – through human speech – although over time, technology has been increasingly used to facilitate or ‘back-up’ oral communication. In ancient times, stories, folklore, histories and news were transmitted and maintained through oral communication, making accurate memorization a critical skill, and the oral tradition is still the case in many aboriginal cultures. For the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means by which people learned and passed on learning. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were recitative poems, intended for public performance. To be learned, they had to be memorized by listening, not by reading, and transmitted by recitation, not by writing. Lectures go back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Demosthenes (384-322 BC) was an outstanding orator whose speeches influenced the politics of Athens.

The earliest generally accepted examples of Chinese writing date back to the reign of the Shang Dynasty king Wu Ding (1250–1192 BC). By the fifth century B.C, written documents existed in considerable numbers in ancient Greece. If we believe Plato, education has been on a downward spiral ever since. According to Plato, Socrates caught one of his students (Phaedrus) pretending to recite a speech from memory that in fact he had learned from a written version. Socrates then told Phaedrus the story of how the god Theuth offered the King of Egypt the gift of writing, which would be a ‘recipe for both memory and wisdom’. The king was not impressed. According to the king:

 it [writing] will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on what is written, creating memory not from within themselves, but by means of external symbols. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow men.

Phaedrus, 274c-275, translation adapted from Manguel, 1996

I can just hear some of my former colleagues saying the same thing about social media.

Slate boards were in use in India in the 12th century AD, and blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn of the 18th century. At the end of World War Two the U.S. Army started using overhead projectors for training, and their use became common for lecturing, until being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational software such as Powerpoint around 1990. This may be the place to point out that most technologies used in education were not developed specifically for education but for other purposes (mainly for the military or business.)

Although the telephone dates from the late 1870s, the standard telephone system never became a major educational tool, not even in distance education, because of the high cost of analogue telephone calls for multiple users, although audio-conferencing has been used to supplement other media since the 1970s.  Video-conferencing using dedicated cable systems and dedicated conferencing rooms have been in use since the 1980s. The development of video compression technology and relatively low cost video servers in the early 2000s led to the introduction of lecture capture systems for recording and streaming classroom lectures in 2008. Further improvements in technology such as Zoom enabled video-conferencing to be streamed from desktop computers. Webinars now are used largely for delivering lectures over the Internet.

None of these technologies though changes the oral basis of communication for teaching.

7.2.2 Written communication

The role of text or writing in education also has a long history. According to the Bible, Moses used chiseled stone to convey the ten commandments in a form of writing, probably around the 7th century BC. Even though Socrates is reported to have railed against the use of writing, written forms of communication make analytic, lengthy chains of reasoning and argument much more accessible, reproducible without distortion, and thus more open to analysis and critique than the transient nature of speech.

The invention of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century was a truly disruptive technology, making written knowledge much more freely available, very much in the same way as the Internet has done today. As a result of the explosion of written documents resulting from the mechanization of printing, many more people in government and business were required to become literate and analytical, which led to a rapid expansion of formal education in Europe. There were many reasons for the development of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the triumph of reason and science over superstition and beliefs in Europe, but the technology of printing was a key agent of change.

Improvements in transport infrastructure in the 19th century, and in particular the creation of a cheap and reliable postal system in the 1840s, led to the development of the first formal correspondence education, with the University of London offering an external degree program by correspondence from 1858. This first formal distance degree program still exists today in the form of the University of London Worldwide . In the 1970s, the Open University transformed the use of print for teaching through specially designed, highly illustrated printed course units that integrated learning activities with the print medium, based on advanced instructional design.

With the development of web-based learning management systems in the mid-1990s, textual communication, although digitized, became, at least for a brief time, the main communication medium for online learning, although lecture capture and video streaming is now changing that.

7.2.3 Broadcasting and video

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting educational radio programs for schools in the 1920s. The first adult education radio broadcast from the BBC in 1924 was a talk on Insects in Relation to Man and was mainly about fleas . In the same year, J.C. Stobart, the new Director of Education at the BBC, mused about ‘a broadcasting university’ in the journal Radio Times (Robinson, 1982).   Television was first used in education in the 1960s, for schools and for general adult education (one of the six purposes in the current BBC’s Royal Charter is still ‘promoting education and learning’).

In 1969, the British government established the Open University (OU), which worked in partnership with the BBC to develop university programs open to all, using a combination originally of printed materials specially designed by OU staff, and television and radio programs made by the BBC but integrated with the courses. Although the radio programs involved mainly oral communication, the television programs did not use lectures as such, but focused more on the common formats of general television, such as documentaries, demonstration of processes, and cases/case studies (see Bates, 1984 ). In other words, the BBC focused on the unique ‘affordances’ of television, a topic that will be discussed in much more detail later. Over time, as new technologies such as audio- and video-cassettes were introduced, live broadcasting, especially radio, was cut back for OU programs, although there are still some general educational channels broadcasting around the world (e.g. TVOntario in Canada; PBS, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel in the USA).

The use of television for education quickly spread around the world, being seen in the 1970s by some, particularly in international agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO, as a panacea for education in developing countries, the hopes for which quickly faded when the realities of lack of electricity, cost, security issues (sets kept getting stolen), climate, resistance from local  teachers, and local language and cultural issues became apparent (see, for instance, Jamison and Klees, 1973 ). Satellite broadcasting started to become available in the 1980s, and similar hopes were expressed of delivering ‘university lectures from the world’s leading universities to the world’s starving masses’, but these hopes too quickly faded for similar reasons. However, India, which had launched its own satellite, INSAT, in 1983, used it initially for delivering locally produced educational television programs throughout the country, in several indigenous languages, using Indian-designed receivers and television sets in local community centres as well as schools (Bates, 1984 ).

In the 1990s the cost of creating and distributing video dropped dramatically due to digital compression and high-speed Internet access.  This reduction in the costs of recording and distributing video also led to the development of lecture capture systems. The technology allows students to view or review lectures at any time and place with an Internet connection. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started making its recorded lectures available to the public, free of charge, via its OpenCourseWare project, in 2002.  YouTube started in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006. YouTube is increasingly being used for short educational clips that can be downloaded and integrated into online courses. The Khan Academy started using YouTube in 2006 for recorded voice-over lectures using a digital blackboard for equations and illustrations. Apple Inc. in 2007 created iTunesU to became a portal or a site where videos and other digital materials on university teaching could be collected and downloaded free of charge by end users.

Until lecture capture arrived, learning management systems had integrated basic educational design features, but this required instructors to redesign their classroom-based teaching to fit the LMS environment. Lecture capture on the other hand required no changes to the standard lecture model, and online learning in a sense reverted back to primarily oral communication supported by Powerpoint or even writing on a chalkboard. This became the main method for delivering education during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus oral communication remains as strong today in education as ever, but has been incorporated into or accommodated by new technologies.

7.2.4 Computer technologies

7.2.4.1 computer-based learning.

In essence the development of programmed learning in the early 1950s aimed to computerize teaching, by structuring information, testing learners’ knowledge, and providing immediate feedback to learners, without human intervention other than in the design of the hardware and software and the selection and loading of content and assessment questions. B.F. Skinner started experimenting with teaching machines that made use of programmed learning in 1954, based on the theory of behaviourism (see Chapter 2, Section 3 ). Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based learning. There has been a recent revival of programmed learning approaches as a result of MOOCs, since machine based testing scales much more easily than human-based assessment.

PLATO was a generalized computer assisted instruction system originally developed at the University of Illinois, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. PLATO was a highly successful system, lasting almost 40 years, and incorporated key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.

Attempts to replicate the teaching process through artificial intelligence (AI) began in the mid-1980s, with a focus initially on teaching arithmetic. Despite large investments of research in AI for teaching over the last 30 years, the results generally have been disappointing. It has proved difficult for machines to cope with the extraordinary variety of ways in which students learn (or fail to learn.) Recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience are being watched closely but at the time of writing the gap is still great between the basic science, and analysing or predicting specific learning behaviours from the science.

More recently we have seen the development of adaptive learning, which analyses learners’ responses then re-directs them to the most appropriate content area, based on their performance. Learning analytics, which also collects data about learner activities and relates them to other data, such as student performance, is a related development. These developments will be discussed in further detail in Section 7.7 of this Chapter.

7.2.4.2 Computer networking

Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol in 1982. In the late 1970s, Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz at the New Jersey Institute of Technology were experimenting with blended learning, using NJIT’s internal computer network. They combined classroom teaching with online discussion forums, and termed this ‘computer-mediated communication’ or CMC (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978 ). At the University of Guelph in Canada, an off-the-shelf software system called CoSy was developed in the 1980s that allowed for online threaded group discussion forums, a predecessor to today’s forums contained in learning management systems. In 1988, the Open University in the United Kingdom offered a course, DT200, that as well as the OU’s traditional media of printed texts, television programs and audio-cassettes, also included an online discussion component using CoSy. Since this course had 1,200 registered students, it was one of the earliest ‘mass’ open online courses. We see then the emerging distinction between the use of computers for automated or programmed learning, and the use of computer networks to enable students and instructors to communicate and interact with each other.

The Word Wide Web was formally launched in 1991. The World Wide Web is basically an application running on the Internet that enables ‘end-users’ to create and link documents, videos or other digital media, without the need for the end-user to transcribe everything into some form of computer code. The first web browser, Mosaic, was made available in 1993. Before the Web, it required lengthy and time-consuming methods to load text, and to find material on the Internet. Several Internet search engines have been developed since 1993, with Google, created in 1999, emerging as one of the primary search engines.

7.2.4.3 Online learning environments

In 1995, the Web enabled the development of the first learning management systems (LMSs), such as WebCT (which later became Blackboard). LMSs provide an online teaching environment, where content can be loaded and organized, as well as providing ‘spaces’ for learning objectives, student activities, assignment questions, and discussion forums. The first fully online courses (for credit) started to appear in 1995, some using LMSs, others just loading text as PDFs or slides. The materials were mainly text and graphics. LMSs became the main means by which online learning was offered until  lecture capture systems arrived  around 2008.

By 2008, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in Canada were using web technology to create the first ‘connectivist’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a community of practice that linked webinar presentations and/or blog posts by experts to participants’ blogs and tweets, with just over 2,000 enrollments. The courses were open to anyone and had no formal assessment. In 2012, two Stanford University professors launched a lecture-capture based MOOC on artificial intelligence, attracting more than 100,000 students, and since then MOOCs have expanded rapidly around the world.

7.2.5 Social media

Social media are really a sub-category of computer technology, but their development deserves a section of its own in the history of educational technology. Social media cover a wide range of different technologies, including blogs, wikis, You Tube videos, mobile devices such as phones and tablets, Twitter, Skype and Facebook. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein ( 2010 ) define social media as

a group of Internet-based applications that …allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content, based on interactions among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.

Social media are strongly associated with young people and ‘millenials’ – in other words, many of the students in post-secondary education. At the time of writing social media are only just being integrated into formal education, and to date their main educational value has been in non-formal education, such as fostering online communities of practice, or around the edges of classroom teaching, such as ‘tweets’ during lectures or rating of instructors. It will be argued though in Chapters 8, 9 and 10 that they have much greater potential for learning.

7.2.6 A paradigm shift

It can be seen that education has adopted and adapted technology over a long period of time. There are some useful lessons to be learned from past developments in the use of technology for education, in particular that many claims made for a newly emerging technology are likely to be neither true nor new. Also new technology rarely completely replaces an older technology. Usually the old technology remains, operating within a more specialised ‘niche’, such as radio, or integrated as part of a richer technology environment, such as video in the Internet.

However, what distinguishes the digital age from all previous ages is the rapid pace of technology development and our immersion in technology-based activities in our daily lives. Thus it is fair to describe the impact of the Internet on education as a paradigm shift, at least in terms of educational technology. We are still in the process of absorbing and applying the implications. The next section attempts to pin down more closely the educational significance of different media and technologies.

Bates, A. (1984)  Broadcasting in Education: An Evaluation  London: Constables

Downes, S. (2012) E-learning Generations Half-an-hour , February 11

Hiltz, R. and Turoff, M. (1978) The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer Reading MA: Addison-Wesley

Jamison, D. and Klees, S. (1973) The Cost of Instructional Radio and Television for Developing Countries Stanford CA: Stanford University Institute for Communication Research

Kaplan, A. and Haenlein, M. (2010), Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media, Business Horizons, Vol.  53, No. 1 , pp. 59-68

Manguel, A. (1996) A History of Reading London: Harper Collins

Robinson, J. (1982) Broadcasting Over the Air London: BBC (out of print)

Saettler, P. (1990) The Evolution of American Educational Technology Englewood CO: Libraries Unlimited

Selwood, D. (2014)  What does the Rosetta Stone tell us about the Bible? Did Moses read hieroglyphs? The Telegraph , July 15

Weller, M. (2020) 25 Years of Ed Tech Edmonton: Athabasca University Press

Activity 7.2 What does history tell us?

1. What constitutes an educational technology? How would you classify a recorded lecture from MIT that is accessed as an open educational resource? When is a technology educational and not just a technology?

2. An early version of the Internet (Arpanet) existed long before 1990, but the combination of Internet protocols and the development of html and the World Wide Web were clearly a turning point in both telecommunications and education (at least for me). What then makes the Internet/the Web a paradigm shift? Or are they just an evolution, an orderly next step in the development of technology?

3. Is writing a technology? Is a lecture a technology? Does it matter to decide this?

4. The more sharp eyed or analytical of you may be asking questions about the categorization or definition of some of the technologies listed above (quite apart from the issue of how to deal with people as a means of communication). For instance computer-mediated communication (CMC) existed before the Internet (from 1978 in fact), but isn’t it an Internet technology? (It is now, but wasn’t then.) How do social media differ from CMC? Does it make sense to distinguish television technologies such as broadcast, cable, satellite, DVDs or video-conferencing, and is this relevant any more? If so, what distinguishes them and what do they have in common from an educational perspective?

These are some of the issues that will become clearer in the following sections.

Teaching in a Digital Age: Third Edition - General Copyright © 2022 by Anthony William (Tony) Bates is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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A Brief History of the Evolution of Classroom Technology [#Infographic]

Learning technologies have come a long way over the past century and a half. But a stroll down memory lane shows that as things change, so many things in the classroom remain the same.

A new infographic from Webanywhere , a UK-based provider of web-based learning platforms, explores 22 of the most influential technologies that have shaped how classrooms function — from 1860 all the way to 2015 and into the future, where virtual reality could soon play a role in education

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Exploring the History and Potential of Education Technology

A brief history of educational technology and a glimpse at where educational technology may be headed in the future. 

Course Description and Learning Objectives

Course Description:

Learners will examine the history of education technology, identify important milestones in education technology, and take a tour of the future possibilities. 

Learning Objectives: 

• Discover education technologies across the ages
• Examine changes to education technology across the decades
• Explore the future of education technology 

Education Technology Across the Ages

Section Learning Objectives:

• Explore education technology throughout history
• Define education in your own terms
• Decide what should or should not be considered education technology

Key Points:

• The definition of education technology varies
• Education technology has existed for thousands of years
• Education technology includes both oral and written forms
• People differ on what consitutes education technology

When viewing the animation (SMARTEduEMEA, 2011) provided below, think about the following:

• How do you define education technology/?
• Do you agree that all of examples provided in the video are education technology?

References:

SMARTEduEMEA. (2011, October 3). The history of technology in education [Video]. YouTube.  The history of technology in education - YouTube

Changes to Education Technology

• Examine how education technology has changed over time
• Identify the most impactful technological advancement in education
• Education technololgy has evolved throughout history
• Major advancements have occurred within the last century
• Calculator 

While reviewing the infographic linked below, identify which education technology you feel has been most impactful to student learning. 

Timeline of Educational Technology in Schools Infographic

Educational Technology Infographics. (2014, March 31). Timeline of educational technolgy in schools [Infographic]. elearninginfographics.com.  Timeline of Educational Technology in Schools Infographic - e-Learning Infographics (elearninginfographics.com)

Future of Education Technology

• Explore future education technology
• Identify an educational technology that will benefit students in the future
• Examine ethical issues related to the future of education technologies 
• Advancements in technologies continually changes the way students learn and the way teachers teach
• Education technologies of the future have the potential to reach more students and personalize learning
• Ethical concerns regarding privacy and security in education technology exist

While viewing the video, think about another potential ethical concern related to advancing education technologies. If you are unable to come up with one, search out a reputable resource on the subject. 

21st Century Skills. (2023, February 12). Use of AI in education  [Video]. YouTube.  Use of AI in Education | Educational Technology - YouTube

Version History

• #Educational Technology in Schools Infographic
• #Educational Technology Timeline Infographic

Timeline of Educational Technology in Schools Infographic

It’s amazing how quickly technology changes, even in the course of six months. But can you imagine how much it has changed over decades? The Timeline of Educational Technology in Schools Infographic shows how educational technology has evolved in schools over the past 114 years.

• 1900 - 1920 - Age of the One-room Schoolhouse
• 1923 - Radios were introduced to classrooms; major cities established classroom instruction on radios - penmanship, accounting, history and arithmetic were included
• 1930s - overhead projectors initially used for US military training purposes quickly spread to schools
• 1933 - 52% of schools were using silent films and 3% were using sound films
• 1939 - the first TV appeared in a classroom in LA; now the most widely used technology in schools
• 1950 - Headphones became popular in schools and stations used to listen to audio tapes were dubbed 'language labs'
• 1964 - BASIC developed at Dartmouth College with the intent to give students a simple programming language that was easy-to-learn
• 1967 - Texas Instruments develops the handheld calculator
• 1967 - LOGO programming language developed
• 1972 - Scantron - automatically graded multiple choice examples
• 1973 - The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (later Corporation), most commonly known as MECC was founded creators of Lemonade Stand ('73) and Oregon Trail ('74)
• 1984 - The Apple Macintosh computer is developed. The ration of computers to students in US schools is 1 - 92
• 1985 - Touch typing software Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is developed and popularized in schools
• 1988 - laptops are developed and are eventually utilized as teaching tools
• 1990 - CD-ROM disks became the new kind of storage
• 1992 - Schools are use Gopher servers to provide students with online information
• 1994 - According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), about 35% of American public schools had Internet access
• 1995 - Most CAI is delivered on CD-ROM disks and is growing in popularity
• 1996 - Faculty create instructional web pages
• 1999 - SMART boards introduced in schools
• 2001 - 80% of schools with internet access offered professional development training for teachers for integrating technology into classrooms.
• 2002 - 99% of schools had internet access
• 2009 - 1 computer for every 5.3 students in US schools
• 2010 - 1 wireless device for every 3.4 students in US schools
• 2011 - 80% of children under 5 use internet daily in the US
• 2012 - 1.5 million iPads provided by schools
• 2013 - 90% of students under the age of 18 have access to mobile technology

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Posted by Michael Haran on May 29, 2015 in i-pel blog , K-12 Classroom Technology | 0 comments

This article is an abstract from Dr. Maryanne Berry’s Sonoma State University EDCT 552 Praxis Course

Watching the NY Times timeline “The Evolution of Classroom Technology” was a good look at how far classroom technology has come and what was considered “technology.” The “Hornbook” and the “Pointer” looked more like the tools of corporal punishment rather than teaching aids. The progression of the “Magic Lantern;” to the “iPad” was a great timeline of the “visual” aids used in the classroom. These devices eventually led to the PowerPoint and now on to the Infographic.

Early 20th Century Classroom

Russell’s “A Brief History of Technology in Education” was the narrative for the NY Times “Timeline” graphic. For the most part I would agree with his observation, “Today, most people associate “educational technology” with computers and the Internet,” however in America’s primary and secondary schools educational technology encompasses much more than computers and has roots that extend back several centuries. Blackboards and books are now taken for granted and are assumed to be part of every student’s educational experience. In their day, these “technologies” were viewed as radical and revolutionary teaching and learning tools. (Russell, 2006, p.137)

In 1806, students would use a desktop sandbox to practice the alphabet. After the children had made each of the letters, the monitor smoothed the sand with a flat iron and a new letter was presented” (Gutek, 1986, p. 62). Considered “a new form of education technology” (Russell, 2006, p.137) one of the earliest forms of teaching technology was images that were drawn in the sand.

After going through most of the devices that were presented in the NY Times “Timeline” Russell finishes his article with computers as the most current “new” educational technology by stating, “While there are many more examples of computer-based tools that are used in today’s classrooms, there is no question that computers are the most recent technology that has penetrated the American educational system. However, an important question that remains largely unanswered focuses on how computer use in schools is affecting teaching and learning” (Russell, 2006, p.152). Good question, but since computers offer so much in the way of education, I think computers are the best thing to happen in the classroom since the blackboard.

I want to include the Cuban and Strudler quotes as they put a contemporary spin on the evolution of education technology. “I predict that the slow revolution in technology access, fueled by popular support and continuing as long as there is economic prosperity, will eventually yield exactly what the promoters have sought: every student, like every worker, will eventually have a personal computer. But no fundamental change in teaching practices will occur;” (Larry Cuban – Stanford) and “Nearly the entire field of technology and education is about change in some way. It’s about the dreams of what could be, the realities of what is, and the efforts to whittle away at the gap between the two.” (Neal Strudler – UNLV)

TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION

One Room Schoolhouse

The first American schools were one-room cabins, the mission of which was to produce literate and moral citizens. Students attended school for between one and six months a year and there were few educational tools available. But as increasing numbers of American communities were settled the education system became more firmly established. To aid the learning process, educational technologies, such as slates, hornbooks, blackboards, and books were introduced.

Although technologies like the blackboard and books are now taken for granted and are assumed to be part of every student’s educational experience, these technologies were viewed as radical teaching tools when they were first introduced. Over time, a variety of technologies such as film, radio, television, teaching machines, microcomputers and the Internet have been introduced to schools, each sparking controversy about its usefulness for schooling and effectiveness as a teaching and learning aid.

THE HORNBOOK AND PRINTED BOOKS

Johannes Gutenberg began building a primitive version of the printing press in 1436 and the first Gutenberg Bible was printed in 1455 (de la Mare, 1997). Nearly two centuries later Stephen Dayne brought the first printing press used in the United States (Rubinstein, 1999). However, since they were expensive and were not readily available, books were not commonly used in the early years of American schooling.

In lieu of printed books, American settlers improvised with a device known as the hornbook. Adopted from England, the hornbook was one of the first forms of educational technology used to aid in teaching reading in American schools. A hornbook was “a small, wooden, paddle-shaped instrument. A sheet of paper, with the alphabet, numerals, the Lord’s Prayer, and other reading matter printed on it was pasted upon the blade and the entire implement was covered with sheets of transparent horn” (Good & Teller, 1973, p. 28). The hornbook was a crude, low-cost solution to the American settler’s problem of how to teach children to read without having books available. Although it was useful at the time, the hornbook became obsolete as the cost of printing decreased and texts became more widely available.

Early School Book

Perhaps the most popular early printed book was the New England Primer: Introduced to schools in 1690, the New England Primer was intended to make learning to read more interesting for children. “The New England Primer contained the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, each letter being illustrated with a drawing and a verse to impress it on the child’s mind. The primer also contained various lessons and admonitions for youth, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.” (Gutek, 1986, p. 10) Historian Paul Leicester Ford estimates that 3 million copies of the New England Primer were printed (Gutek, 1986).

The next generation of written texts included Webster’s first spelling book, followed by the McGuffy Readers. The evolution of these primitive textbooks allowed teachers to follow a predefined sequence of lesson plans that taught students how to read and write. In this way, early books served as a tool that began to standardize the content to which students were exposed.

THE SANDBOX

In 1806, the Lancastrian methodology of schooling was introduced in New York City and with this new method of teaching came a new form of educational technology. Lancaster’s method of education was appealing because a large number of students could be educated for a low cost. This method employed a master teacher as well as “monitors” (more advanced students) to teach large classes of students. The monitors, who had been trained by the master teacher taught groups of approximately twenty students a skill, such as writing. Students would use a sandbox on their desk to practice the alphabet: “White sand overlaid the box and the children traced the letters of the alphabet with their fingers in the sand, the black surface showing through in the form of the letter traced … After the children had made each of the letters, the monitor smoothed the sand with a flat iron and a new letter was presented” (Gutek, 1986, p. 62).

Lancaster chose sandboxes because they were the most economically affordable form of technology available at the time. But by the 1830’s, doubts about the effectiveness of the Lancastrian system surfaced. With the decline of this teaching method, the use of monitors and sandboxes ended. Later the sandboxes would be replaced by individual slates. Although they were more expensive, slates allowed students to practice their writing skills more easily. Erasing chalk from a slate was quicker and cleaner than ironing the surface of the sandbox.

THE BLACKBOARD

Slate Tablet

While individual slates were used in classrooms during the early 1800s, it was not until 1841 that the classroom chalkboard was first introduced. Shortly thereafter, Horace Mann began encouraging communities to buy chalkboards for their classrooms. By the late 1800s, the chalkboard had become a permanent fixture in most classrooms.

As with many forms of educational technology, learning how to integrate the chalkboard into classroom instruction was not an easy task. As Shade (2001) explains, “When first introduced, the chalkboard went unused for many years until teachers realized that it could be used for whole group instruction. They had to change their thinking from individual slates to classroom slates” (p. 2).

Similar to more modem forms of educational technology, the chalkboard also received praise from community leaders. As an example, Josiah Bumstead, a Springfield Massachusetts councilman, said, “The inventor or introducer of the blackboard deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind” (Daniel, 2000, p. 1). Thinking of the blackboard as a revolutionary form of educational technology seems counterintuitive. But it is one of the few types of media that has survived the test of time and is still regularly used in classrooms today.

MAGIC LANTERN

Magic Lantern

The height of its popularity was around 1870. The predecessor to the slide machine, the magic lantern projected images on glass plates. By the end of World War I, Chicago’s public school system had a collection of some 8,000 lantern slides.

LEAD PENCILS

Lead Pencils

Around the turn of the 20 th century mass produced pencils and paper become readily available, gradually replacing the school slate.

STEREOSCOPE

Stereoscope

At the turn of the 20 th century, the Keystone View Company began to market stereoscopes. The three dimensional devices, which were popular in home parlors, were sold to schools featuring educational sets containing hundreds of images.

During the next several decades, the American educational system expanded and became more developed. The price of producing paper and printing books also dropped to levels that enabled paper to replace slates and allowed each child to have his or her own books. But just as books were becoming widely available to students, a new form of educational technology began to emerge, namely film.

Film Strip Projector

The kinetoscope, which is now known as the motion picture, was invented in 1889. Over the next decade, film equipment was developed and refined. And in 1902, Charles Urban of London began exhibiting the first educational films. Among these films were “slow-motion, microscopic, and undersea views” and “such subjects as the growth of plants and the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis” (Saettler, 1990, p. 96). In 1911, Thomas Edison also contributed to the use of film in the classroom by producing a series on the American Revolution.

With the rapid growth of American schools, both in terms of the number of schools and the quantity of students attending those schools, there was a pressing need to provide standard, high-quality instruction to large numbers of students. At the time, some proponents believed that using film in classrooms met this important educational need. As an example, Thomas Edison proclaimed, “Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to touch every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.” (Saettler, 1990, p. 98)

In 1910, enthusiasm for educational films led Rochester New York’s Board of Education to adopt education films for instructional use. Many other public school systems soon followed Rochester’s lead and by 1931 “twenty-five states had units in their departments of education devoted to films and related media” (Cuban, 1986, p. 12). Edison’s prophecy and the public school support for educational film spawned a new and quickly growing industry in America, namely educational film.

Film Strip Viewer

As early as 1910, more than 1,000 film titles were catalogued in George Kleine’s Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures. In 1923 Frank Freeman classified the existing educational films into the following four categories: “(1) the dramatic, either fictional or historical; (2) the anthropological or sociological, differing from the dramatic in that it is not primarily based on a narrative or story; (3) the industrial or commercial, which show the processes of modern industry and commerce; and (4) the scientific, which may be classified into subgroups corresponding to the individual sciences, such as earth science, nature study, etc.” (Saettler, 1990, p. 97).

Despite the explosion of educational films, conflict emerged between the commercial interests and the educational interests of the film industry. Concerns about the financial bottom line led the film industry to develop educational films which some critics claimed lacked content and were more theatrical in nature. In addition, teachers often were not asked for input and guidance in making educational films. As a result, the films frequently did not meet teachers’ needs. Then, in the late 1920s, sound film was introduced.

Although the ability to include sound was a step forward for the film industry, it also contributed to the demise of educational filming. Requiring new and expensive equipment, production of educational sound films became an expensive endeavor. At a time when commercial filming was struggling and educators were questioning the merit of film in classrooms, strong advocacy for educational sound films was lacking.

Although film continued to be widely used by the government for armed forces training, agricultural demonstrations, and public relations, the impact of film in the classroom was minimal. As Cuban (l986) described, “film took up a bare fraction of the instructional day. As a new classroom tool, film may have entered the teacher’s repertoire, but, for any number of reasons, teachers used it hardly at all” (p. 17). According to Cuban, the main reasons for the limited instructional use of film included “teachers’ lack of skills in using equipment and film, cost of films, equipment and upkeep, inaccessibility of equipment when it is needed and finding and fitting the right film to the class” (p. 18).

Radio entered the educational system in the early 1920s. Like the early days of film, radio was heralded as a tool that would revolutionize classroom teaching. Similar to the proclamations of Thomas Edison regarding film, William Levenson, the author of Teaching through Radio, predicted, “The time may come when a portable radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the blackboard. Radio instruction will be integrated into school life as an accepted educational medium.” (Cuban, 1986, p. 24)

Early Radio

In 1923 Haaren High School in New York City became the first public school to use the radio in classroom teaching. Following a decision by the Radio Division of the U.S. Department of Commerce to license time from commercial stations to broadcast educational lessons, many more schools and districts bought equipment and made plans to use the radio in classrooms. Falling equipment prices in the 1930s further increased interest in the instructional use of radio.

Typically, educational radio programs lasted between 30-60 minutes and were broadcasted a few times a week. The limited amount of broadcast time “destined radio usage to be viewed as a supplement to teacher instruction.” (Cuban, 1986, p. 22) Nonetheless, a wide range of radio lessons were readily available to teachers. “There were broadcasts for elementary school listeners and for secondary-school students. There were dramatic re-creations of American history, challenging interpretations of American folk music, delightful dramatizations of children’s stories and legends. There were, in short, a variety and a wealth of curricular material on the air.” (Woelfel & Tyler, 1945, p. 42)

Two survey studies conducted in 1941, one in Ohio and one in California found that the majority of schools had radio receivers. Moreover, the amount of radio hardware available to teachers in the 1930s and 1940s exceeded the amount of film hardware available at the height of film use.

Higher education was also impacted by the invention of the radio. Some colleges and universities established their own radio stations for instructional use. Ohio State University first began broadcasting weather reports in 1912. But the radio was not used for instructional use in higher education until the 1920s, when “schools of the air” were formed. These radio-based schools partnered with a local radio station, developed curriculum, created lesson leaflets, produced educational programs, established a weekly schedule for broadcasts, trained staff, and ultimately executed the concept of “schools of the air.”

Educational technology zealots initially dreamed of the radio replacing both schools and teachers. But by the end of the 1940s, funding and educators enthusiasm for radio use diminished significantly. Saettler identified problems with equipment and support as two factors that limited instructional use of radio. In addition, Saettler (1990) found that schools “fail to use (the radio) properly or integrate its programming with the school curriculum” (p. 197).

Similar to problems encountered by educational films, another factor that contributed to the downfall of educational radio was the struggle between commercial stations and educators. A 1925 decision by Herbert Hoover, who was then Secretary of Commerce, to leave radio in the hands of American business, instead of having it controlled by the government made efforts to keep educational radio alive exceedingly difficult. Unable to conduct a unified fight to maintain a presence on radio stations, educational interests in radio were overpowered by the commercial radio stations united fight against educational radio. “The networks maintained that allocating frequencies for educational broadcasting would only disrupt a successful system of broadcasting that had just begun to function well.” (Saettler, 1990, p. 203) As a result, educational radio languished as the big business of commercial radio boomed.

By the end of the 1940s, technology proponents had given up on educational radio and instead began focusing on the use of television in schools, which was perceived to be the ultimate combination of audio and visual technology.

OVERHEAD PROJECTOR

Overhead Projector

In the 1930’s the overhead projector was widely used by the U. S. Military to train forces during World War II and eventually the device spread to schools.

THE TYPEWRITER

An often overlooked form of educational technology, the typewriter is the one form of mechanical technology that has penetrated and been used by large numbers of students over several decades. This use, however, has generally been limited to “business” classes that focus specifically on teaching students how to type. While typewriters were present in most high schools into the 1990s, they have been absent from the majority of classrooms and not used widely throughout a student’s educational experience. However, there are close parallels between the typewriter and more modem forms of computer-based technologies.

Early Typewriter

The first functioning typewriter was marketed and sold by the Remington Arms Company in 1873. Years of refinement and use in the business world followed this initial product launch before typewriters were introduced to schools in the 1920’s. Soon thereafter, Ben Wood and Frank Freeman (1932) conducted a large-scale experiment to develop an understanding of how typewriters might be used in early elementary classrooms.

Occurring between 1929 through 1931, Wood and Freeman’s experiment was similar to many studies of computers conducted during the late 1980s and the 1990s in that the stated purpose of Wood and Freeman’s investigation was “to study the nature and extent of the educational influences of the portable typewriter when used as a part of the regular classroom equipment in the kindergarten and elementary school grades” (p. 1). In other words, rather than focusing narrowly on how the use of typewriters affected the writing skills of young children, Wood and Freeman were primarily interested in how instructional practices and classroom ecology changed. For this reason Wood and Freeman’s study examined how the typewriter could be integrated into the curriculum and the impacts that it had on teaching and learning.

Almost 15,000 students from eight public school districts and five private schools participated in the experiment. Treatment and control groups were formed in order to study the differences in student learning. Data that was analyzed included achievement test gains, student writing samples, teacher questionnaires, classroom observations, and student letters about why they like typewriting.

1930 Typing Class

Based upon their study, Wood and Freeman (1932) concluded that there were three important reasons for using the typewriter in schools:

 (1)    to teach students skills that they will use later in life for personal or professional reasons

(2)    to enable students to better learn English, spelling, arithmetic, geography, history, etc.,

(3)    to develop those attitudes and habits which constitute so important a part of the aims of elementary school education” (p. 179).

Even though Wood and Freeman (1932) found evidence that typewriters could be used in early elementary classrooms, and this use had a positive impact on student learning, their recommendation to place typewriters in all early elementary classrooms was never implemented. In part, the high cost required for such large numbers of typewriters was not feasible, particularly when the nation was struggling with a major economic depression. Instead of being directly placed and used in classrooms as a writing tool, typewriters were used to prepare students for the business world by teaching high school students the professional skill of typewriting.

Although it wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s that instructional television reached its peak, the first documented use of closed circuit television was in Los Angeles public schools and at the State University of Iowa in 1939. While the popularity of instructional television was rising between 1939 and the 1950s, the overall United States educational system was facing harsh criticism.

1950s Classroom TV

Alleged evidence of the ailing educational system culminated with Russia’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. Fear that the Russians had surpassed the United States in science and technology led to educational reform efforts. Instructional television was viewed as one way to gain ground in the fight to stay ahead in technology. In response, financial support for instructional television poured in from many government and industry sources. The Ford Foundation alone “expended more than $300 million for the national educational television movement” (Saettler, 1990, p. 372).

Funding was provided for several types of instructional television application similar to the introduction of film. Some administrators and government officials hypothesized that television could provide students with a better education at a lower cost. To this end, a few school systems, such as Hagerstown Maryland and American Samoa, attempted to substitute a large portion of teacher-led classroom time with educational television programming. The primary reason for the infusion of television in these communities was the lack of certified teachers. In most schools, however, instructional television served a supplemental role and was used minimally. Cuban estimates that by 1975 primary-grade students spent on average only five hours a week learning through instructional television (Cuban, 1986. p. 32).

During the 1960s the television industry underwent a major transformation. In 1965, a Carnegie Corporation Commission recommended that “the federal government establish an independent, nonprofit Corporation for Public Television that would receive money from the government and other sources and distribute these funds to individual stations and independent production centers” (Saettler, 1990, p. 377).

1940’s Phillips TV

Essentially putting into effect the Carnegie Corporation recommendation the Public Broadcasting Act was passed in 1967. Two years later, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was established and in 1970 the Public Broadcasting Service was created to act as a distribution point and to manage the interconnection between stations.

All of these events in the public television industry would appear to set the stage for tremendous success of instructional television. However, some critics believe the end result hurt instructional television more than it helped. For example, Bronson criticized the way that the CPB handled instructional television, stating that it “indicates a questionable bureaucratic concern with directing social change rather than in promoting the development of educational broad casting” (Saettler. 1990, p. 384).

Although several early studies showed benefits of television over teacher instruction, later reports revealed that support for instructional television had diminished significantly. One source of this lack of support was from teachers. Typically, implementations of instructional television did not considered teacher needs or views. Cuban (1986) describes how, rather than consulting teachers, “television was hurled at teachers” (p. 36).

Channel One

 Interest in educational applications of televisions was revived in 1989 when a private, for-profit company began marketing an educational channel directly to schools. As Saettler (1990) describes, “Whittle Communications assembled a board of twelve educators and public figures to provide advice and direction for Channel One, a satellite-received news programming venture aimed at elementary schools” (p. 533).  As an incentive to broadcast Channel One to students, Whittle Communications offered schools up to $50,000 of free televisions and video equipment and 1,000 hours of educational programming in exchange for a guarantee that students would watch 12 minutes of daily news programs which includes two minutes of paid commercials each day. Channel One has since changed its focus from elementary schools to middle and high schools, but maintains the same business plan.

Despite the fact that California and New York banned Channel One, by 1993 more than 8 million students nationwide watched Channel One’s programming daily (Barry, 1994, p. 103). Channel One, however, has faced strong opposition. As Saettler (1990) states, “All critics agree that the classroom should not become another market to exploit” (p. 534). Channel One is yet another example of the tension, and perhaps incompatibility between corporate America and the educational system.

TEACHING MACHINES AND PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTION

In the 1960s, behavioral psychology contributed to the educational technology field by introducing “teaching machines.” Reminiscent of Tiu! Turk, an 18th century “computer” that wore a turban and played chess (Standage, 2002), teaching machines were intended to teach students through thoughtfully programmed instruction.

Teaching Machine

Books accompanied the teaching machines and functioned in an adaptive fashion, so that if a student did not understand a concept, the student is directed to a section that further explained it. If the student exhibited mastery of the concept, he or she was directed to the next topic. Teachers were able to program the teaching machines based on their desired curricular goals while students worked at their own pace through the lesson plans. But once programmed, it was the machine that directed students to the appropriate lesson, either in books or on the machine.

When using programmed instruction, students were first presented with material in successively more difficulty steps. The student was then asked to answer a question about the material. Some questions were multiple choice, while others used a fill in the blank format. The program then compared the student’s answer with the correct answer. Positive reinforcement was given to students who responded correctly while the proper response was provided to students who answered incorrectly. Skinner believed that all students should be administered the same set of questions, and students should be able to answer 95% of the questions correctly.

Later in the life cycle of teaching machines and programmed instruction branching algorithms and adaptive tests were developed to tailor the material and questions to an individual student’s needs. In general, evaluation of programmed instruction in the classroom showed that although implementation was difficult, the combination of teacher instruction and programmed instruction was more effective than either method used in isolation.

Skinner described the key characteristic of teaching machines and programmed instruction as “the arrangement of materials so that the student could make correct responses and receive reinforcement when correct responses were made” (Saettler, 1990, p. 294). This statement points to one of the major sources of conflict in the use of teaching machines. Too often teachers and administrators found themselves caught up in the excitement of using technology and neglected what many people now recognize as the more important component- the program of instruction. Students were sometimes bored with the level of instruction, and other times, they found ways to cheat the system and bypass lessons (p. 303).

Skinner introduced programmed instruction at Harvard University in 1957. A year later, Evans used the programmed instruction concept in books at the University of Pennsylvania. The first use of programmed instruction in an elementary school was in 1957 at the Mystic School in Winchester, Massachusetts. In general, though, teaching machines and programmed instruction were not widely used in public school classrooms or in higher education.

The popularity of teaching machines and programmed instruction followed the familiar cycle of most other forms of educational technology. In the late 1950s many people in the educational technology community expressed praise for this new tool: “In its short history this area of teaching technology has had a remarkably widespread effect on all forms of teaching” (Kay, Dodd, & Sime, 1968, p. 1). However, teaching machines and instructional programming never reached the stage of widespread use and in the late 1960s even the strongest proponents were backing down from their initial claims. Skinner once said, “… unfortunately, much of the technology has lost contact with its basic science. Teaching machines are widely misunderstood.” (Saettler, 1990, p. 303)

The research in the 1950s and 1960s on programmed instruction laid the foundation for the development of more advanced learning systems. Computers were first used in education in the 1960s in a way that was intended to individualize instruction. This method became known as computer assisted instruction (CAI).

CAI was intended to teach students a specific content area. Initially, the only difference between CAI and teaching machines was the type of technology used to deliver the material. Drill and practice techniques were common. “The student was asked to make simple responses, fill in the blanks, choose among a restricted set of alternatives, or supply a missing word or phrase. If the response was wrong, the machine would assume control, flash the word ‘wrong’ and generate another problem. If the response was correct, additional material would be presented.” (Saettler, 1990, p. 307)

The first generation of CAI programs used mainframe computers, was very expensive, and did not achieve the expected benefits of improving education through computer-based individualized instruction. However, this initial introduction of computers in schools spawned interest in a variety of other computer-based applications.

History of Computers

In the late 1970s the cost and availability of microcomputers reached a level at which it was more practical to place computers in K-12 schools. For a variety of reasons, parents, industry leaders, and government officials put pressure on school districts and principals to introduce computers into the schools. One reason for this computer enthusiasm was the fear that the United States was continuing to fall behind other world powers in terms of technology (C. Hunter, 1998), and teaching students to learn how to use computers seemed like one solution to this problem.

Another reason for the external pressure to use computers in schools was the perceived need to teach children job-related skills. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the importance of computers in the business world increased rapidly. As a result, teaching students how to use computers provided them with real-world skills and helped them become more competitive e in the job market.

Finally, it was argued that computers would make the educational process more efficient. Many computer advocates argued that a more refined version of the mainframe computer-assisted instruction would allow larger class sizes and, therefore, there would be a need for fewer teachers, since students would be able to rely on the computer for a significant portion of their learning.

Classroom Computer

Depending upon one’s perspective, the use of computers in schools differed significantly. For example, if the goal was to teach students how to use a computer so that they could obtain work skills, schools would introduce computer literacy classes into the curriculum. If the goal was to improve instructional efficiency, the computer was used as a tool to teach students the predetermined content. Finally, some people argued that the main benefit of using a computer in the classroom was to improve students’ problem-solving skills. This debate over how computers should be used in schools still exists today and is strikingly similar to the differences between Wood and Freeman’s rational for placing typewriters in elementary classrooms in the late 1920s versus the use of typewriters in business classes to teach discrete typewriting skills in order to prepare students for the workplace.

But no matter what the intended uses were, computers entered schools in large numbers during the early 1980s. Cuban (1986) references a survey that found an increase of 100,000 computers in schools over the year and a half between fall 1980 and spring 1982. Between 1982 and 1984, that number grew to 325,000 computers. By 1988, there were an estimated 3 million computers in schools (Saettler, 1990, p. 457).

Much of this growth can be attributed to corporate donations, which companies made in an effort to gain an edge in the educational computing market. Throughout the 1980s, IBM, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and Tandy all donated substantial numbers of computers to public schools. In elementary schools, these computers were generally used for repetitive drilling of specific content. In high schools, computers were generally used to teach students computer skills.

Early Education Software

By the end of the 1980s, computers came under heavy scrutiny. Government leaders, parents, and school administrators wanted evidence of the effectiveness of using computers in schools. Instead of detailing benefits, researchers revealed a list of obstacles to the use of computers in classrooms. Similar to the problems identified with film, teachers felt that they were generally excluded from the development of instructional software and that the commercially available software generally did not meet their needs. Specifically, teachers felt that many of the available software packages did not engage students, and teachers felt that the drill and practice format was not an effective use of students’ time. Again similar to film, teachers also did not have the time or expertise to develop their own computer-based instructional materials. Finally, technical problems further frustrated teachers. All of these problems contributed to low usage. Saettler estimates that, on average, in the late 1980s, a typical student used a computer for less than 30 minutes a week.

In contrast to the 1980s, the 1990s was a decade of new ideas and innovations for computer use in classrooms. With the introduction of color monitors and graphical user interfaces, more interactive and interesting content-based software packages were developed by companies like Tom Snyder Productions. In addition, simulations, intelligent tutors and cognitive-based learning tools such as DIAGNOSER (Minstrell, Stimpson, & Hunt, 1992) or the Algebra Cognitive Tutor (Anderson et al., 1995) began to show promise for improving classroom learning. Schools also began to understand the benefit of helping teachers determine how to integrate computers into their curriculum. While these advances did not correct all the obstacles to computer use identified by teachers during the late 1980s, they reignited interest in instructional uses of computers.

LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Learning Management Systems (LMS), also known as Instructional Management Systems are online collaboration and communication tools which enable administrators, teachers and students to collaborate and communicate online in real-time across geographic distance. Some of the more popular commercial and open source LMS include Blackboard Learning System , Share-Point LMS , ANGEL Learning Management Suite , Sakai , and Moodle .

LMS combine online course management, communication and collaboration tools which can include a discussion forums , file exchange , email , online journal/blog , real-time chat , interactive whiteboards , bookmarks , calendar , search tool , group work , electronic portfolio , registration integration , hosted services , quizzes/surveys , marking tools/grade book , student tracking , content sharing and object repositories , amongst other tool offerings. (Fox, C., et al. (2009) pg. 8).

INTELLIGENT TUTORING

Neuroplasticity

The field of cognitive science has exploded over the past decade and computer applications have emerged to take advantage of this new knowledge of how the brain works. Merging the fields of education and cognitive science has proven to be difficult. Bruer (1998) describes, “New results in neuroscience, rarely mentioned in education literature, point to the brain’s lifelong capacity to reshape itself in response to experience.  The challenge for educators is to develop learning environments and practices that can exploit the brain’s lifelong plasticity,” (p. 9). One practical application of lessons learned from programmed instruction and new information about how the brain works came in the 1990’s in the form of intelligent tutoring.

For the past decade, Carnegie Mellon has been developing cognitive tools. Carnegie Mellon’s first major tool, called the Practical Algebra Tutor (PAT), strives to improve students’ algebra skills and contains “a psychological model of the cognitive processes behind successful and near-successful student performance” (Koedinger, Anderson, Hadley & Mark, 1997, p. 32).

Intelligent Tutoring

PAT is computer-based, uses real-world problems, and allows students to use several tools to solve a given problem. One example of a PAT problem is to determine which car rental company should be used on a vacation, given differing cost and terms of agreement information. Feedback is given to the student while he or she is solving the problem, allowing student misconceptions to be addressed while the student is still engaged with the problem. PAT uses model tracing to track a student’s progress throughout a problem and knowledge tracing to track a student’s progress in a series of problems. A Bayesian model, which estimates whether a student possesses a certain skill or knowledge of a particular subject, is used to highlight each student’s strengths and weaknesses. This information is then used to choose the next problem to be administered and to pace students.

The PAT program was first pilot tested in 1993 in three Pittsburgh high schools. Since then, the intelligent tutoring tools have been expanded to include a fully developed series of products (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Integrated Math Series and Quantitative Literacy) that are being used throughout the country. Through a series of studies conducted over the past decade (see Corbet, 2002 for a review of this research), evidence suggests that a diverse population of students “including mainstream, non-mainstream, gifted, minority, ESL and inclusive education students all benefit” from the use of the Cognitive Tutor® curricula (Carnegie Learning, 2002, para.

Similarly, researchers at the Concord Consortium have been working on an intelligent tutoring device that focuses on genetics and scientific reasoning skills. The system is intended to help eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-grade students learn about genetics through guided exploration. Most often, the system introduces students to new concepts by asking students to explore a specific topic through manipulation of genetic traits of a fictitious species of dragon.  As students work with the system, new concepts are revealed through guided exploration. For example, the first set of explorations during one lesson culminates by asking students to describe how traits are produced in dragons.

At times, the learning system presents textual or graphical information to explain concepts and provides students with access to various tools and pieces of information via menu selections. In addition, the system often asks students to demonstrate their understanding through written responses to specific questions, multiple-choice questions and, most often, the modification of different aspects of genetic codes to create dragons with specific traits or to determine how a trait suddenly appears in a generation of dragons. From an instructional perspective, Biologica enables students to explore a complex topic via a variety of media and enables teachers to work individually or with small groups of students as questions arise.

Although these tools are being used in a relatively small number of classrooms, they show tremendous promise for using technology as a tool that assists students and teachers in both identifying and correcting misconceptions in a timely manner.

THE INTERNET

Virtual Learning

Today, the Internet is one of the more popular forms of educational technology used in classrooms. Although some college level courses can be taken online, often without any student-teacher interaction, this type of use is just beginning to penetrate K-12 public schools, particularly at the high school level.  As an example, the Virtual High School (VHS) was launched in the late 1990s. Since then, VHS has grown and served approximately 3,000 students in more than 150 schools with 134 online courses in 2001. Similarly, the Florida Virtual School provides free, online instruction to 6,900 students enrolled in 65 Florida county school systems.

In addition to online courses, there are a variety of ways that the Internet is being used in classrooms. A 2002 study by the American Institutes for Research found that students use the Internet for school in the following five ways:

as a virtual textbook and reference library

• as a virtual tutor and study shortcut
• as a virtual study group
• as a virtual guidance counselor
• as a virtual locker/backpack and notebook

Scatterspots

(Levin & Arafeh, 2002, p. iii). Teachers also integrate Internet-based activities into their lessons. In some cases, teachers will use data or simulations available on the Internet to demonstrate a concept or work through a problem with the whole class. With the rapid increase in Applets (mini-applications that are available on the Internet), teachers have access to powerful tools that enable easy manipulation of data and displays information in a manner that often makes it easier for students to visualize concepts.

As one example, the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative has developed a set of applets that focus on specific statistical concepts (www.bc.edu/research/intasc/tools.shtrnl). These tools enable teachers and students to generate scatterplots that meet specific conditions (e.g., a correlation between two variables of .65 with 200 cases). The correlation applet also allows the user to move individual data points around within the scatterplot and then see how this change in a single data point affects the correlation. In addition, the applet allows the user to manipulate a “line of best fit” by clicking and dragging it on the screen. As the line is moved, the error of prediction is updated automatically enabling the user to visually explore how changes in the line affect the accuracy of the prediction. Applets developed by other organizations allow teachers to model scientific principles such as plate tectonics and sound waves by manipulating data and then visually displaying the effects.

 Teachers also direct students to use the Internet to find and explore information related to a specific topic of study. As an example, many upper elementary and middle school teachers have students perform web-quests. In some cases, web-quests take the form of problems that require students to find and apply information to solve. As an example, a teacher might present a problem in which an animal that lives in Australia has decided to relocate to one of three areas within the United States.  Students are then asked to use the Internet to find specific information about the animal and about each area of the United States and to then use this information to write a recommendation to the animal that includes data to support the recommendation. In other cases, web-quests take a more mundane form in which students are given a list of actual questions and are asked to use the Internet to find the answers.

While there are many more examples of computer-based tools that are used in today’s classrooms, there is no question that computers are the most recent technology that has penetrated the American educational system. However, an important question that remains largely unanswered focuses on how computer use in schools is affecting teaching and learning.

Although technically part of the internet, because of its impact on K-12 education cloud technology should be looked at separately.

Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network. At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services. Cloud resources are usually not only shared by multiple users but are also dynamically reallocated per demand. This approach maximizes the use of computing power thus reducing environmental damage as well since less power, air conditioning, rack space, etc. are required for a variety of functions. With cloud computing, multiple users can access a single server to retrieve and update their data without purchasing licenses for different applications.

Cloud Technology

The present availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware virtualization, service-oriented architecture and autonomic and utility computing have led to a growth in cloud computing. School districts can scale up as computing needs increase and then scale down again as demands decrease. (Wikipedia)

Different schools use different devices at different grade levels which mean varying data storage needs. And, for example, there is no need to shoehorn an infrastructure built for the Android operating system to fit a Mac-only school. Using “standards-based vendor control” cloud technology allows the accommodation of the districts for any device choice, whether it is a Chromebook, an Android device, or an Apple device which typically have no hard drives. The cloud technology allows the schools to pick the device and to find the common denominators in delivering support services.

Freedom of choice applies to where students can do their work. A lot of local school districts rely on local outreach programs from their city, from local businesses where students might have remote labs. They might have libraries or boys and girls clubs where they need access to their information on a device that they might be able to have for an hour or two at a time. Cloud technology allows the entire curriculum and supplements to be connected to the student’s online identity and account—and not to a specific device.

Cloud technology allows secure access for students, teachers, and administrators to enter cloud storage from any device at any time, via a Dropbox-style entry point. And the cloud is large enough to accommodate an “archive forever” infrastructure. This means that teachers retain access to curriculum and student data, while students can always access projects that might be part of an e-portfolio. (http://thejournal.com/Articles/2013/06/05/Sharing-the-Cloud-in-Illinois.aspx?Page=1)

It’s fascinating to review how western education technology has evolved. Just as our culture and society have become more complex formal education has become more multifaceted to keep pace. So what’s next? Who knows but with as fast as technology is advancing we probably have not seen anything yet. Maybe devices like Google Glass, where students wear a computer as eyewear or maybe a planetarium like classroom where all manners of education will simply swirl around the students heads.

But what’s more important than any new device, or even the existing one, is to track how effect these devises are in aiding student gain the knowledge and skills they need for today’s world.  All these classroom devices are neutral what’s not neutral is determining just what is the knowledge of most worth in a contemporary society. Of course we have been arguing about that forever but not only does the curriculum have to relevant it also has to be interesting for the student. Once that’s determined all these devices will be standing by to make learning multi-dimensional and brought to life in the classroom.

Russell, M. (2006) Technology and Assessment: The Tale of Two Interpretations, Information Age Publishing (pp. 137-152)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/19/magazine/classroom-technology.html?_r=0

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SOCIAL STUDIES

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The History of Technology in Education

The students in your classroom can’t imagine a world without technology. 

Computers have always been a part of their lives. Young learners have been immersed in technology since they could crawl, and they show little to no interest in giving it up. But is that such a bad thing? Perhaps not!

Many educators appreciate using technology, too. It’s an integral part of curriculum mapping, classroom instruction, and assessment. We’ve certainly come a long way since the early days of technology—but maybe it’s worth a history lesson to really put things into perspective. Below we explore the history of technology in education.

A Brief History of Educational Technology

Over the span of fifty years, we’ve gone from treating technology as an isolated novelty to seamlessly integrating a variety of edtech tools into our lessons. How did this change occur?

Technology originally made its way into the U.S. education system as a necessity to prepare for an increasingly digital future and as part of its Cold War era competition. After witnessing the launch of Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s first satellite, America shifted much of its attention in education to math and science while embracing technology in particular. The Vocational Education Act in 1963 funded technology use in schools. As a result, students learned programming languages like BASIC, and PCs gradually made their way into some classrooms.

Educators took two approaches when incorporating computers in classroom instruction.

The first was less common. Mathematician and professor Seymour Papert first introduced microcomputers in the classroom by teaching basic programming in the early 1980s. His Logo program taught students basic programming skills. The idea was to create student-centered learning activities that required hands-on exploration. Children learned the language commands that would create graphic shapes. Papert based his instructional program on a theory of constructivism that he termed “bricolage,” which is a strategy in which students assemble the building blocks of learning themselves.

By the mid-1980s, Apple computers had also gained a foothold in classrooms, and a more common approach to technology integration gained popularity. Teachers used edtech software solutions.Teachers routinely assigned students to computer tasks, where learners answered series of questions based on knowledge and recall.

A mere decade later, the Internet connected computers worldwide. The dramatic growth of the World Wide Web introduced email, video, and a variety of digital media. More importantly, it enabled two-way communication between anyone, anywhere, and anytime.

That connectedness revolutionized not only business and interpersonal relationships but also education. Beginning in the early 2000s, there was a greater emphasis on a new form of education: STEM, short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Computers and technology are the future—we may as well embrace them for all the benefits they bring to the classroom.

Technology in Education Today

Because learners need digital skills, educational technology today has taken on a vibrant role in many classrooms. The focus now is on teaching students important computer literacy skills.

Educators and policymakers have arrived at a nexus of thought about what technology integration looks like in the classroom. " The ISTE Standards for Students "  now includes creative innovation, the development of communication skills and collaborative work projects, engaging in the kind of critical thinking that results in solving problems and decision-making, and acquiring 21st-century digital citizenship skills. This is in addition to learning how to operate computer hardware and software.

The   Partnership for 21st Century Skills  lays out a similar vision for integrating technology in the classroom. Information, media, and technology skills are vital components to empowering students in all communities. The organization partners with schools and communities to ensure that students everywhere develop the mindset and skills necessary for living and learning in a rapidly changing environment.

Most teachers support these technology standards. They want to see their students taking technology initiatives and utilizing digital tools for their own learning purposes.

Students should be using handheld devices to engage with content in meaningful ways like:

• Creating digital video and graphic media design to support concepts
• Engaging in live vlogging about a topic of study
• Using classroom polling to hear different perspectives on issues
• Developing collaborative projects among diverse teams
• Gathering and interpreting data from a variety of online sources
• Experiencing virtual simulations that assist in exploring otherwise inaccessible material

Educational technology integration today is interactive and ongoing. Using personal computers, students learn concepts, assess their progress, and continue to add to their knowledge and skill base. In a sense, learners are assembling and building knowledge, like in a modern-day version of bricolage.

The Future of Technology in Your Classroom

Unfortunately, not all classrooms are at the same level of educational technology integration. Adopting state-of-the-art technology can be expensive, and ever-tightening budgets determine what type of tech integration is possible.

It would be wonderful to gleefully issue each student a tablet and tell them to work with the device. But that’s not feasible, nor would it even be effective — students need guidance when it comes to unfamiliar technology. And the need for guidance means teachers themselves must be taught how to navigate edtech.

If you’re in a classroom or school with limited options for technology integration, consider starting with s mall steps like these:

• Take a trip—virtually . Attend a theater preview, explore a cave, or visit a museum. By doing so, you’ll broaden your student’s horizons.
• Integrate digital media into your lessons . Play podcasts, show short explanatory videos from educational YouTube channels, incorporate interactive charts and graphs, and so on. Showing is often more effective than telling, especially when explaining abstract concepts like graphing algebraic equations with multiple variables or understanding biology.
• Bring your own device . Ask your school to consider implementing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy as an alternative to funding the purchase of new devices. This can make technology more accessible and could allow you to allocate a technology budget for students who cannot afford to purchase those devices themselves.
• Make the most of the internet . Launch a website, a class media page, or other interactive platforms where your students can curate content and practice their communication skills.
• Use freely available edtech tools.  There are plenty of apps that encourage collaborative learning in the classroom by allowing students to edit documents or other media with each other in real time. You can use those alongside activities like mind mapping, commenting, and providing feedback. You can also manage a digital calendar of events for your classroom, such as for assignment due dates or upcoming school events.

The activities are less about the kind of technology you’re using in the classroom and more about what students can do with the technology that’s available.

Use Technology Effectively

As the history of technology in the classroom demonstrates, technology integration in education teaches students the skills they will need, including creativity and innovation, collaboration, and communication.  Most of all, these integrated and interactive educational technology activities encourage students to take the initiative and engage with the content in every class they take.

Embedding technology in the 21st-century classroom is about creating an opportunity for students to be self-directed learners, now and beyond their formal education.

The world influences the classroom through technology. You can influence how that technology will be used in your classroom by making interaction a priority.

This article was adapted from a blog post initially developed by the education technology company Classcraft, which was acquired by HMH in 2023. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of HMH.

Find more   lesson plans and classroom resources   on  Shaped .

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The evolution of technology use in American education

Nora Joy , News Editor | November 20, 2021

Teachers have began to incorporating more technology into their lessons after adapting their teaching to virtual classes last year.

The American educational system has been working to expand technology within classrooms for the past decade. The pandemic exacerbated this effort, leaving teachers with decisions regarding how much technology to implement in their classrooms. Although in-person instruction is necessary for student well-being, the use of technology adapted during virtual learning can still be beneficial for learning in the future.

The National Education Technology Plan 2010 , developed in November 2010 by the Obama administration, called for using advanced technologies in the education system to improve student learning. This initiative forever changed the trajectory of education in America. Eleven years and a pandemic later, the vision of the Obama administration is beyond what many believed to be possible at the time, as technology is now viewed as a necessity within the educational system.

Within the past eleven years, the education system in the United States has undergone massive reconstruction with the implementation of technology in the classroom. This was only furthered in March of 2020 after the United States was forced into a situation of mass technological reliance after COVID-19 closed all public schools in the United States for the remainder of the school year. The closure of schools forced both teachers, and students to adapt to a fully virtual classroom, relying on technology to communicate, develop digital curriculum and complete virtual assignments.

Schools around the country used resources such as Google Classroom and Zoom to complete school work. While these resources allowed students to continue learning despite school closures, the excessive use of technology necessary to hold school from home had negative effects on students. Senior Michael Joseph spoke about his experience learning virtually on zoom last year.

“Zoom was exhausting for everybody. Sitting in front of a screen [every day] for a lot of time is really difficult,” Joseph said.

“Zoom was exhausting for everybody. Sitting in front of a screen [everyday] for a lot of time is really difficult,” Joseph said.

DGS psychologist Catherine Robinson expanded on Joseph’s idea, sharing how virtual class affected students’ mental health.

“What we’ve learned from last year is that it [e-learning] increased isolation, putting students more at risk for depression and anxiety. It[excessive technology] impacts motivation, attention/concentration, attitudes, social interactions and causes fatigue.” Robinson said.

This wasn’t just true for DGS students. While school continued during the pandemic e-learning produced unwanted outcomes regarding student mental health. The American Psychological Association reported that around 81% of teenagers experienced high levels of stress during the pandemic. Robinson believes this is due to lack of interaction between students and teachers and not associated with increased technology use in the classroom.

Now that most schools around the country are completely back to full-time in-person learning, teachers have been faced with decisions about how much technology to use in their classrooms. Many teachers have adapted their teaching largely to an online classroom and now must decide how much of their virtual lesson plans they should incorporate into their in-person instruction.

DGS English teacher Lauren McSweeney shared how she has been integrating technology into her teaching this year.

“I would say I have incorporated technology a lot because I have found that my lesson plans are a lot more efficient now. I’ve definitely had to adapt them back in certain ways,… but I can see things like Pear Deck can still be really engaging… I would say that my lessons got better through COVID…” McSweeney said.

Additionally, McSweeney feels that technology is leading her to a more efficient classroom.

“Having access to so many resources has really helped my students. I think how quickly they can pull things up in the middle of class or share things with other students, it just feels like things work faster,” McSweeney said.

Sophomore Sophie Ring shares her observations regarding technology use in her classes this year

“I feel like we used computers a lot more after the pandemic. We do more google docs and stuff online…I think teachers are using technology a lot more because all of their lesson plans are from last year which was all online so we are still using online stuff,” Ring said.

In an already technologically advanced society it seems that the pandemic has added a level of sophistication to technology use in the classroom after forcing teachers to reinvent how they incorporate technology into their teaching. This seems to indicate that technology use in schools will only be furthered in the coming years now that administrators, teachers, and students have had the opportunity to experience the vast ways technology can be used in learning.

• Catherine Robinson
• Lauren McSweeney
• Mental Health
• Michael Joseph
• Sophie Ring

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