As Ed Tech has been getting back into full swing for the fall, I have also been getting settled into my placement at Detroit School of the Arts. And as we have been discussing ways of using technology in the classroom, one major issue keeps coming up for me again and again: access.
I loved Rory's presentation about a fun way to get to know your students and for them to express themselves. It sounds like a great tool that creates classroom community and produces valuable information for the teacher. But I couldn't help but think about how it would be all by impossible at my placement. We have a laptop cart, sure, but when we tried to turn them on with our mentor, something like 6 out of 25-30 turned on successfully, and we couldn't log in to half of those. Even if we could get all 30 on, how would that work with our class of 40? (Never mind that we had 50-60 for the first three weeks of school.)
So I can't help but be a little frustrated. I wish I could think about fun ways to use technology with my whole classroom, but the resources simply aren't there. And the sad fact is that this is true at many, many schools. Additionally, based on student surveys we administered as an assignment for our Methods course, several of our students don't have a computer and/or internet access at home, and some don't have a smartphone. These challenges are reality. And the fact that it's a minority of students doesn't matter - for any strategy to be equitable, it must be accessible to all my students, and if even one student can't participate, I can't use the strategy. There are many computer labs at our school, but since the students don't have any free periods during the day, and are often busy with extracurriculars after school (or need to get a ride or bus home immediately - our students live scattered around Detroit, so they can't walk home), I feel I can't assign any work that requires computer use outside of the classroom. It's a conundrum.
Of course, in the future, an important and accessible answer to this problem is to seek funding for resources for my classroom. A set of Chromebooks, a document projector, iPads, etc. That is certainly a route I will pursue in the future, especially after seeing what having technological resources for my whole class can do. But this solution doesn't work for my current situation, and I admit to feeling some frustration. That said, I appreciate having the experience of teaching in a high needs environment (relatively speaking - DSA is quite well off as far as Detroit schools god) while my peers experience very different settings because I am learning in a very concrete way what differences in resources and opportunity mean for the learning of students.
Anne, your comments illustrate the resonance of equity issues in the "Teaching with Technology" domain, as well as issues of support and maintenance that have long bedeviled schools.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, both sets of issues are (arguably, potentially) addressed in Liz Kolb's presentation this Thursday about mobile technology in learning. Working with (more) available technology that also can help us to navigate the question of tech upkeep...a possible solution (or at least part of one)?
Anne,
ReplyDeleteNo doubt, this is (and always will be) an issue. Re: Jeff's comment, I wonder if Liz's presentation provided any solutions.
I'm really glad that you made this post because I think it's easy for people to forget that there are many students in many schools that just don't have regular access to technology. What you said about how any strategy that you use has to be accessible to all of your students in order for it to be equitable rings especially true. In my placement, most of the students have smart phones, and the school provides a lot of resources in the media center that students can use before, during, and after school. Even in a setting like this, which sounds quite different from your placement, I still see some of the same issues. There are students who can't get to school early and have extracurricular activities right after school or have to ride the bus home. For them, taking advantage of what's in the media center is nearly impossible. It makes me wonder whether they are able to get what they need at home. What if they share one computer with their parents and a couple of siblings? If everyone needs to do certain things on the computer, how limited is each person's time every night? Just the other day, I wanted my Algebra students to get started on their homework during the last ten minutes of class, but none of them had their textbooks. I told them that they could use their phones to look up the problems on the textbook website, but several of them looked at me and said that they couldn't do that on their phones. I was kind of taken aback, and it reminded me that we shouldn't assume anything about access. In order to incorporate technology equitably in the classroom, we need to know exactly what each student has (or doesn't have) to work with first. I'd be interested to hear how your thoughts on this evolve as the school year progresses.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is such a big issue in a lot of schools. What strikes me is that people really only think about it in urban schools, but I have friends who teach in schools that wouldn't be considered high need schools where the technology just isn't there. It takes a big initiative for a school to allocate enough resources to have enough working lab tops for even a couple classes of students to be using them all at once.
ReplyDeleteAccess issues are where I see the biggest divide between placement and university in our program. There are so many ideas that seem cool in theory, but just don't work in a specific placement classroom.
And while I think the cell phones in the classroom idea is a good start to bridging this gap, some things just aren't reasonable to do on a phone.