Have any of you read this book? I just ordered it after hearing an interview with the author on the TeachThought podcast. The interview was interesting, in depth, and had quite a few points that struck me.
One that I want to touch on is the podcast host and the author discussed the origins of EdTech as being personalized education. Teaching machines, or very primitive EdTech that wasn’t really tech as we think of it now, were meant to help students work at their own pace. I’m really not doing justice to the discussion, so be sure to take a listen to the episode. In any case, it was brought up that machines like these were also used during an era when voting rights were being denied to POC due to a literacy requirement, so teaching machines were utilized to try to increase literacy enough to pass that test, and then enable them to vote in the upcoming election.
This discussion was situated within the larger discussion that edtech has historically been something less than desirable in terms of teaching, and often used on students of color, those considered needing extra help in order to meet learning objectives. But what happened with this form of edtech, was those students then had much less peer interaction, teacher attention and opportunities for deeper social learning. Whereas something I consider enhancing education was definitely used to discriminate within education. This is definitely something worth pondering every time I utilize a tool within the classroom. Is what I’m doing benefiting the whole student or not?
I do see a strong role for edtech within the classroom, but my view has always been to lead with the pedagogy not the technology. Then, if there is a technology tool that will enable me to meet the pedagological need, I integrate that tool. And edtech definitely comes in many categories now, to suit many categories of needs.
One category the authors describe in the history of edtech is utilized in a rote or structured way to teach students in a linear path. This is there the author and the podcaster talked about behaviorism and Skinner. This repetitive, sometimes dull, learning is actually quite a good candidate for edtech. That sounds bad, but I actually mean it in a good way. Behaviorism is actually effective at learning certain types of skills.
The authors note behaviorism is at the beginning of a psychology textbook before it gets to more enlightened and recent categories from cognitive science. And that’s true in that it was very popular decades ago, and was studied extensively. But it still holds today, though not everyone wants to admit it. If you want to teach someone skills lower on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge or lower on Bloom’s taxonomy, techniques from behaviorism are actually quite effective, and edtech tools based on behaviorism are useful as well. Have you ever used online flashcards? They are great for this. How about Kahoot or Khan Academy? Same. This is focused on recall of facts that can be assessed with simple multiple choice, matching, etc. And a computer is a great 1-1 aid in the classroom for these skills. In math that might be multiplication tables, vocabulary review, simple calculations that need to be mastered before moving into the more complex work.
When you do get to the high level thinking, the edtech though needs to change. I would never use the classroom favorite Blooket to work on higher level concepts. That’s not what that tool is designed to do. Instead we might use something like Jamboard or another collaboration tool to share ideas before a class discussion. We might use Desmos to help us visualize a graph, or Mathigon to play with some shapes in transformation work. The tool needs to be ideally matched to the learning objective you are targeting.
In summary, the author touched on it briefly in the discussion, but when choosing an edtech tool, be cautious and deliberate in your classrooms. Make sure you understand what philosophy that tool was building on and what it does. Match that to your intended objective in the classroom. Edtech available today is amazing and practically limitless, but not every tool is suited to every lesson.