Linda Dawson is IASB director/ editorial services and editor of The Illinois School Board Journal.
In 1997, then-President Bill Clinton issued a call to action for education in the 21st century with the following statement:
“Preparing our children for a lifetime of computer use is now just as essential as teaching them to read and write and do math.”
At that time, just 4 percent of schools in the U.S had a computer for every five students and just 9 percent of classrooms had Internet connections. By 2003, 93 percent of public schools in the U.S. had Internet access in instructional rooms, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
While schools have concentrated on raising math and reading test scores under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, NCLB also contained a mostly overlooked, or at least little publicized, provision that all student be technologically literate by eighth grade.
Unfortunately, even the experts can’t always agree on what it means for a student to be “technologically literate.” Fortunately, NCLB left it up to each state to define “tech literacy” for its students.
If the definition were based on their ability to play video games or set the clock on a DVD player, even most 10-year-olds would pass with flying colors. However, Andrew Trotter, writing for Education Week in 2009, described the confusion over a tech literacy definition as “competing meanings and diverse ways of measuring it.”
One meaning, from the Washington-based International Society for Technology in Education, has an “information and communication and learning technologies” orientation, according to ISTE’s chief executive officer Donald G. Knezek, who was quoted in Trotter’s article, “Tech Literacy Confusion.” Another meaning has been offered by the International Education Technology Association and is “much more industrial and career-oriented,” Knezek said.
Trotter’s theory is that if you include “too many specific technical skills, high-level cognitive skills, and specialized workforce skills — even if valuable — (you) would only make technology literacy more difficult to promote and achieve.” Add that to the fact that technology continues to evolve rapidly, and you have a moving target to try to assess.
The Colorado Department of Education has a simple definition of technology literacy:
“The ability to responsibly use appropriate technology to:
• Communicate
• Solve problems
• Access, manage, integrate, evaluate, design and create information to improve learning in all subject areas
• Acquire lifelong knowledge and skills in the 21st century.”
In “Realizing Illinois,” which provides information about the new Illinois State Learning Standards that will incorporate Common Core Standards, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) talks about technology as it fits into college and career readiness. Technology is listed under the “capacities of the literate individual” as being a portion of the “anchor standards” in English Language Arts — reading, writing, speaking, listening and language. The passage states:
“Students employ technology thoughtfully to enhance their reading, writing, speaking, listening and language use. They tailor their searches online to acquire useful information efficiently, and they integrate what they learn using technology with what they learn off-line. They are familiar with the strengths and limitations of various technological tools and mediums and can select and use those best suited to the communication goals.”
So far, having multiple meanings of tech literacy has not posed a serious problem. However, a new “technology and engineering literacy assessment” is being developed for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test beginning in 2014. And with Illinois phasing in new learning standards, the time is rapidly approaching when consensus will be needed on what tech literacy means and what students will have to know and be able to do to show proficiency.
Testing technologyAccording to the NCES, which provided the statistics on computer usage, the initial NAEP (also known as the Nation’s Report Card) tech literacy assessment may be limited in scope as the experts work on the questions to include, how those questions should be designed, and — maybe more importantly — how they will be scored.
While all states are required to participate in NAEP testing, not all students are tested every year and not every subject is tested of the 12 areas for NAEP assessments. In 2009, just 500 Illinois schools were selected to participate in NAEP testing, according to ISBE.
The assessment for tech literacy is one of three tests currently under development by NAEP. While the tech literacy test is due to be given in 2014, other new assessments for foreign language and world history, originally scheduled for 2012, have been postponed until 2018.
The National Center for Education Statistics said NAEP assessments for tech literacy would concentrate first in three areas:
• Technology and society — the effects that technology has on society and on the natural world and the ethical questions that arise from those effects;
• Design and systems — the nature of technology, the engineering design process by which technologies are developed, and the basic principles of dealing with everyday technologies, including maintenance and troubleshooting; and
• Information and communications technology — computers and software learning tools, networking systems and protocols, hand-held digital devices, and other technologies for accessing, creating and communicating information and for facilitating creative expression.
As they respond to these test questions, NCES said students will be expected to demonstrate the following three “practices”:
• Understanding technological principles (how well students are able to make use of their knowledge about technology);
• Developing solutions and achieving goals (how students systematically use technological knowledge, tools and skills to solve problems and achieve goals presented in realistic contexts); and
• Communicating and collaborating (how well students are able to use contemporary technologies to communicate for a variety of purposes and in a variety of ways, working individually or in teams, with peers and experts).
The test, according to NAEP, will be computer-based and will contain some standard multiple-choice questions. However, students will need to be prepared for other more complex types of problems.
NAEP is not the first to test tech literacy. In 1991, the North Carolina State Board of Education voted to require that all students (beginning in 2000) would need to demonstrate computer proficiency in order to graduate from high school. However, after developing the assessment as well as alternate assessments for students with disabilities and students in buildings with “technical limitations,” it was eliminated with the 2009-10 school year.
In 2008, England also began using a battery of tests to assess student mastery of technical skills as well as how ready the students are to apply those skills. In “Tech Literacy: the British Way,” Grace Rubenstein describes tests that go beyond basic keyboarding and ask students to actually “do things.” For example, students might be asked, by e-mail, to design a tourism brochure and would have a full set of generic software — an e-mail program, a Web browser, a database manager and more — at their disposal to finish the project.
Closer to homeOne Illinois district that is embracing technology is Palos CCSD 118 in Palos Park. Board members and staff from the district presented a panel at the National School Boards Association conference in Chicago in April 2010 and at the IASB/IASA/IASBO Joint Annual Conference in Chicago in November 2010.
The November panel was “standing-room only,” according to Deborah Balayti, District 118 coordinator of teaching and learning technologies.
The school board in District 118, which has 1,800-plus students in suburban Cook County, made a commitment in 2006 to create “digital-age” schools that would increase opportunities for the use of online tools, improve the way students see and hear the curriculum, and support all stakeholders in making the shift to new ways of learning and connecting.
The 2006 retreat that jump-started the district’s technology improvements was attended by board members, the superintendent, the assistant superintendent and Balayti, who brought in a teacher from each of the district’s three buildings to show what might be possible with whiteboard technology in the classroom. From there, Balayti worked with a small group to develop a technology plan, with input from teachers, parents and students.
Balayti said the tech plan incorporated the vision that the board had worked on during the retreat, and it was accepted by the board. In order to finance their vision, the board authorized the issuance of $500,000 in bonds so that other programs did not have to be cut in order to achieve their goal.
Since then the district has enhanced its website, put grades and student work online, and uses e-mail and phone “blasts” for emergency communication to parents. The board also has adopted paperless, Web-based packets for its own meetings to model the digital behavior it seeks to foster in students and staff.
Classrooms have interactive whiteboards, wireless slates, document cameras, online curriculum tie-ins and distance learning opportunities with the high school. Student work, even from first graders, includes video presentations posted on the website.
But the thing that makes this new technology work is the buy-in that they have from the teachers, according to Balayti. “We made sure they saw the need,” she said, “and we provide support from within each building.” The overall commitment to professional development around technology is for everyone — administrators, board members and support staff, as well as teachers and substitutes.
Teachers received three initial days of training, at a cost of about $55,000, during the summer before the whiteboards were installed in their classrooms. Ongoing support and training has been done over summer breaks and is available on institute days as well as during planning periods.
On the day that she was interviewed, Balayti had been working with teachers around a new software component for the Everyday Math curriculum.
“We make sure they have the tools they need so they have that comfort level,” she said.
All of the students “love using the little clickers,” Balayti said, even the special education students. The whiteboards actually allow special needs students to work on gross motor skills as well as engaging them with movement and touch.
Word of what District 118 is doing has spread throughout the community. When a parent at one of the local Catholic schools provided whiteboards for all of their classrooms, the parochial school turned to the public school district for advice on what to teach and how to teach with the new technology.
“We’re working with the school to help them learn useful ways of implementation,” she said.
Being preparedIn order to be ready for tech literacy assessments, districts that have not embraced new technologies may need to gear up quickly. While some have integrated whiteboard technologies into classrooms for even their youngest students, others are beginning to experiment with students using their cell phones in class to access information on the Internet. But not everyone has been as quick to adopt and adapt to the new learning styles that have emerged as “digital” students entered their classrooms.
Marc Prensky, a speaker, writer, consultant and designer of more than 50 software learning games, urges educators to make use of technology to reach students and help them learn even more with the assistance of the technology they love.
Writing about a 2004 study by NetDay, which found that students approach everything in their lives differently because of technology, Prensky points out that “digital natives” (your students) are creating their own ways of learning and doing things, often “under the radar” of most “digital immigrants” (your faculty, staff and parents).
“Recently when a 12-year-old, whose in-school problems were giving his parents fits, wanted a pet lizard,” Prensky wrote in “The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native: What they do differently because of technology, and how they do it,” “he spent days searching the Web for everything he could find on different types of lizards as pets, and the advantages and disadvantages of each and presented his parents with a 20 page report. (He didn’t get the lizard, but his parents were impressed, as was I.)”
When students want to learn about something that interests them, Prensky said, “they have the tools to go further in their learning than ever before — far beyond their teachers’ ability and knowledge, and far beyond what even adults could have done in the past.” Unfortunately, much of their school work is not as interesting to them, he added.
In a comment on one of Prensky’s other writings, someone asked why students couldn’t just learn like people did in the ’60s and ’70s, from books and teachers and looking up information in the library. But what if the lizard researcher went to the library and all the books on lizards had been checked out?
Students don’t want to have to “power down” when they go to school. The question to educators then might be: “Why should they have to do things ‘old school’ when so many other options are available today?”
Policy questionsIn order to capitalize on this new way for students to learn, school boards and administrators, as well as legislators, will need to take a long look at their vision for education in the future, the changes that will inevitably need to be made and the policies that will support and sustain those changes.
In Palos CCSD 118, the vision of what education might look like in the future was changed five years ago, when the board agreed to support and to integrate technology into district schools.
In “Integrating Literacy and Technology in the Curriculum,” the International Reading Association offers these recommendations for policy makers, which although aimed at legislators could also apply to school board members:
• Support initiatives that guarantee Internet access for schools and libraries.
• Support initiatives that provide funding for staff development and teacher education in integrating Internet and other technologies into the literacy curriculum.
• Ensure that the new literacies of the Internet and other information and communication technology are integrated within assessments of reading and writing proficiency.
• Expand definitions of reading to include locating, critically evaluating, using and communicating information in networked information environments such as the Internet.
In addition, the Reading Association recommends devoting at least 30 percent of the district’s technology budget for staff development for effective instruction with technology, providing sufficient time for teachers to become proficient in information and communication technology, and to advocate including technology in state reading and writing assessments.
The exact assessments that can be expected from NAEP testing will not be revealed until closer to the 2014 expected date for the new testing. But as Illinois moves toward its new Common Core-based learning standards, school board members have a chance to make certain that their policies allow and encourage teachers and students to embrace new technology in the classroom. And by using new technologies in the classroom, students should be ready for the technology assessments of the future.
References“NAEP Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment,” National Center for Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/techliteracy/
Marc Prensky, “The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native: What they do differently because of technology, and how they do it,” 2004, http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-The_Emerging_Online_Life_of_the_Digital_Native-03.pdf
“President Clinton’s Call to Action for American Education in the 21st Century,” http://www2.ed.gov/updates/PresEDPlan/part11.html