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A high-tech route to smarter kids?

It's pricey and of unknown value in boosting achievement, but local districts say this: It gets kids interested and involved

By Sheila G. Miller / The Bulletin

Last modified: March 11. 2010 8:49AM PST

MADRAS — When Elizabeth Bare's third-grade students study mapping and Alaska's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, they reference the fraying paper map tacked up at the rear of the classroom.

The Buff Elementary students also spend quite a bit of time studying directions and map coordinates with the help of a software program called Kidspiration. Their fingers tap persistently on laptops and their eyes rest on the classroom's SMART board, which Bare operates with a wireless mouse and slate from the rear of the room.

This is a 21st-century classroom.

Teachers and administrators hope students will become as proficient in technology as they do in reading, writing and arithmetic. It's not cheap, and there's no proof that having the latest gadgets available will increase student achievement or help them pass state tests. In fact, districts are beginning to conduct their own research on whether the millions of dollars being spent on technology will help students learn. But anecdotal evidence from area districts indicates the addition of computers, iPods and other technology does what sometimes no standard lesson plan can: get kids engaged and interested.

“Technology doesn't teach,” said Sue Taylor, the Jefferson County School District instructional technology coach. “It's just another tool in a teacher's bag of tricks. But it might help reach kids who weren't being impacted.”

Teaching tactics in Jefferson County

There are all kinds of equipment and software being used in classrooms these days. In addition to more common pieces like iPods and laptops, many schools are purchasing SMART boards, a display connected to a computer and projector that projects the computer's desktop onto the board. Teachers and students can control the computer with a pen, a finger or other implements, like a tennis ball on a stick. Boards can cost at least $2,000.

Jefferson County School District started its influx of classroom technology in 2007 with a $250,000 federal grant. That grant, designed to enhance education through technology for students in third through fifth grades, was followed by two similar ones in 2009, the most recent for $275,000, and local business Central Oregon Seeds Inc. provided some matching funds to purchase more laptop carts.

Some of the money has gone to professional development to help teachers learn to use the software and hardware; the federal grants require that 25 percent of the funds go to professional development. The rest has gone to new equipment and programs that officials hope will help improve student learning, with a focus in third through seventh grades. As part of the new focus on technology, several teachers in each building have been named technology mentors.

“It's been a real groundswell,” Taylor said. “If it had come from the top down it wouldn't have been as successful. But people were wanting to get involved.”

Now there are 80 SMART boards in schools around the district; there could be as many as 120 by the start of the 2010-11 school year. Nearly all K-8 classrooms have projection equipment, and more than a dozen laptop carts moving through classrooms in the district's six schools.

The latest grant will also pay for an after-school program for 20 seventh-graders who will learn higher-level technology skills. They will then become a student help desk that provides computer assistance to teachers and students around the school, and run a family night to teach parents some tech skills.

With the resources the district has put into technology, it now wants to know whether any of it will make a difference. So officials are doing research on their own.

“We're looking critically at our practices, ‘How is what we're doing impacting student achievement?'” Taylor said.

Taylor is using state assessment data and creating other ongoing in-class assessments that will seek to show a connection between the technology and the increases students might make in the classroom.

Some teachers have been conducting research projects in which they teach lessons with the technology and give pre- and post-tests to see whether the technology improves the lesson or student understanding.

“It's hard to isolate,” Taylor said. “There's a lot of things we're doing to try to improve student achievement.”

Not much research

Jefferson County isn't the only school district struggling to determine just what effect technology can have on student achievement.

Many of the grants provided to fund classroom computers and other equipment comes with a requirement that teachers go through training and professional development; therefore, whether the gains in achievement are linked to the technology or the teacher's increased abilities is hard to track.

And there's not much completed research on the subject.

For example, the Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology is part of the International Society for Technology in Education, which has offices in both Eugene and Washington, D.C. It offers research evidence showing technology can influence academic performance, but many of the studies are at least 10 years old.

A researcher in Colorado studied teaching and student outcomes in about 180 classes, with teachers running a lesson plan with and without SMART boards. The research generally indicated that students who learned with the boards had a higher achievement level, although in 23 percent of the cases teachers produced better results without the boards.

With so little research to show whether money is being spent on the right tools, more studies are underway.

This year, the state of Oregon awarded Bend-La Pine Schools a nearly $275,000 grant to help R.E. Jewell Elementary School fourth-graders improve their writing skills with an infusion of computers and other tech gadgets. The goal of the grant: provide evidence that technology can increase student learning in core subjects.

To measure what effect, if any, the influx of technology has on students, teachers have collected writing samples. In the spring they'll take another set of samples to see what progress students have made. The district will also use the state writing assessment and will have the fourth-graders take a technology literacy assessment the state has developed.

Several weeks ago, the school received five carts, each with 16 laptops, for each fourth-grade classroom. The classrooms will also have SMART boards and other gadgets.

Amy Lundstrom, Bend-La Pine Schools' instructional technology coordinator, based that grant on information from the Stanford Study of Writing, which looked at college students' writing and determined that nearly 40 percent of student writing took place outside of the classroom online, in social networking and other forums.

According to the study, students write more now than in the past but in different ways, and are much less enthusiastic about class writing than personal writing. Using technology, Lundstrom believes, will increase Jewell student interest in developing writing skills.

Fourth- and fifth-grade teacher Jaime Speed has certainly seen that phenomenon at Juniper Elementary, which became a technology magnet school five years ago.

Speed said she can't prove a definite correlation between her students' use of technology and their scores on state assessments. But she has seen an improvement in student writing and research ability and a clear increase in interest.

“It's tricky to know because we're constantly trying to improve, so is it the new reading program or is it the technology? It's difficult to pinpoint,” Speed said. “One thing I do know is that it's improved student interest in school and student interest in learning both reading and writing.”

Many of the projects her students complete using laptops and other technology are placed online on Speed's Web site for parents and friends to see.

“They take such a great pride in their work that they are constantly reading and practicing and improving because they know it's not just for me,” she said. “They know it's a big deal, and I see them taking a much more involved interest in what they're learning.”

She's also seen jumps in reading and on early literacy skills tests after starting a program three years ago in which she recorded herself reading and commenting on books, then put the recordings on iPods that she sent home with students so they could practice reading at home.

Equipment isn't cheap

It's innovations like Speed's that Bend-La Pine Schools officials believe make the outlay of funding for technology worthwhile. According to Finance Director Brad Henry, the district has spent about $5.25 million since the 2006-07 school year on instructional technology. For the 2009-10 school year the district budgeted $500,000, not counting grants. The district operates annually on a roughly $120 million budget.

Lundstrom said the first step for Bend-La Pine was simply getting every school operating on the same software and hardware.

It's taken a long time, but Lundstrom feels like the district is finally getting where it needs to be with the right tools in classrooms.

“I think we're a good halfway,” Lundstrom said.

The district almost exclusively uses Apple computers, and Carlson said the plan is to provide a laptop to each district teacher and to place a presentation station, complete with projector, document camera and speakers, in each classroom in the district's 27 schools.

“The greatest financial expenditure we have made is to upgrade the school wiring, the Internet connections, the supporting electronic equipment,” Carlson wrote in an e-mail.

One of the challenges of funding instructional technology is the constant need for upgrades; Lundstrom hopes that won't prevent continued funds from coming into her department.

Next year, eighth-graders around Oregon will take a test on their tech literacy; Lundstrom believes some students in the district are unprepared.

“Some will do very very well, others will be completely lost,” she said.

That's because for many schools in the district, computer access is limited to state testing.

“We can't get them into the labs to teach them skills,” Lundstrom said.

She'd like to see a ratio in the district of two or three students to each classroom computer.

And she wants the use of technology to become an expectation of teachers, rather than a choice.

“For many teachers, it's still a choice whether they want to use technology or not,” Lundstrom said. “Teachers need to see the impact that technology learning tools can have on students.”

They seem to be catching on; a survey Lundstrom presented to the school board in February showed 67 percent of teachers in the district considered themselves proficient or advanced in using technology, more than double from a previous survey in 2009; the survey also indicated 94 percent of teachers said their laptops were important or necessary to do their jobs and 74 percent said their presentation stations were important or necessary to do their jobs.

That's how Buff Elementary's Bare sees technology in her Madras classroom.

Bare's class uses laptops for at least an hour three or four days each week. The class uses the SMART board daily.

“It's just part of the daily routine,” Bare said. “They know the functions. They can do any type of basic research. ... They're pretty fluent in using this stuff.”

Bare sees students retaining more information because they are both seeing the lesson and using their hands to reinforce it.

“I have 100 percent of my students participating and they're not afraid to make mistakes because we're all doing something new,” she said. “I don't know what I did before.”

And Juniper Elementary's Speed said she doesn't know what her students would do without the knowledge they're gaining.

Her students write on blogs, e-mail one another and pen pals in Costa Rica, create documentaries and movies and podcasts. Currently students are using a software program called Garage Band to create raps about the Bill of Rights. Her students just completed a project they worked on with a school in New Jersey.

“Our world is different,” Speed said. “We are actually preparing kids for jobs that don't exist yet, while 50 years ago we were preparing them for jobs that existed. We need to teach our kids to think collaboratively, to think globally, to see the world beyond the classroom, or not just our kids but the U.S. will be left behind.”

Sheila G. Miller
can be reached at 541-617-7831 or at smiller@bendbulletin.com.

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