Summary. Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers. Teaching and Learning with Technology. Technology Can Have a Positive Impact on Education: Deploy It Disruptively! Neither Michael Wesch or Mark Bauerlein are fundamentally wrong. How can neither be wrong if they, respectively, wrote blogs in this forum where one said technology in classrooms could really help and the other said technology in classrooms has been proven again and again to be basically useless? It’s simple really. Technology for technology’s sake is not a cure in the classroom.
But technology can be a part of the solution for our schools, provided it is implemented correctly. Why Schools Struggle One of the core reasons our schools struggle is that the way they teach and test do not match the way students learn. It is perhaps an obvious point, but every individual learns differently. Given that we know this, we might expect schools to customize the way they teach and test.
Why is this if we all — educators most certainly included — know better? To move toward affordable customization, the school system’s architecture has to move away from this interdependence and become more modular. Technology Is Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say. The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students’ capability to focus.
Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology’s impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students. The timing of the studies, from two well-regarded research organizations, appears to be coincidental. One was conducted by the Pew Internet Project, a division of the that focuses on technology-related research.
The other comes from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that advises parents on media use by children. Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students’ attention. “I’m an entertainer. Dr. Experts Debate the Impact of MOOCs on Education. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are praised for providing a free education to people across the world. But they have a murky record in terms of their overall effectiveness, particularly in light of their low student completion rates. Experts are divided on whether MOOCs can improve the overall quality of higher education in the U.S. Some say the courses have already made a positive imprint, while others say more time has to pass before the effects of MOOCs can be seen in online and brick-and-mortar classrooms. [Learn about the controversy behind MOOCs.]
Fiona Hollands, who recently led a study about MOOCs for Columbia University's Teachers College, says there is little data about whether MOOCs are more effective than other learning models. "Almost no one is doing that work," she says. That said, she believes there is some evidence that MOOCs have begun to have a positive influence in on-campus classrooms. [Explore how online education could lower the cost of a degree.]