Overview
After reading the "Environmental Scan of Educational
Technology in U.S. Public Schools", I connected my understanding of
knowing our patrons with Technology availability. Any educator should already
establish the importance of knowing your school's patrons, but this report
helps to dive deeper into understanding the importance and interrupting of the
information. An extra interesting fact about this report was that it was commissioned
by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA).
Time to Dive In
I am a teacher in Klein ISD which starting this year became
a 1 to 1 district. This is amazing as our district encompasses a wide range of
demographics. This is an attempt to level the playing field with technology
available to all students. I am a second-grade teacher at a school with 890
students. Our largest ethnic group making up a little over half of the campus
is Hispanics. The next large ethnic groups were White (250) and African
Americans (180). As for economic disadvantage compared to non-advantage
our campus is almost an even split at 49.8% and 50.2%.
After comparing the "Environmental Scan of Educational
Technology in U.S. Public Schools", with my observations of our campus
along with the Texas Education Agency, 2023 Performance Report I agree with the
following observation, "The use of mobile devices has expanded rapidly,
and there is an increasing number of Americans (13% in 2015) who lack home
broadband access and depend on smartphones for Internet connectivity."
(Cohen Group, 2016). I find this to be very true not just on our campus
but in our district. Our district used to offer hot spots if families requested
them, but we had so few families requesting them because of smartphones that the
hot spot program was discontinued this year.
With our district becoming 1 to 1 we have found a lot of benefits in
our classrooms. We can tie in more programs for our students to use and they
truly enjoy it because it appears as a game to the them. We have so many programs
that I can’t even list them all but a few off the top of my head we use daily
are Google Drive, Schoology, Waggle, Happy Numbers, Lexia, Math Fact Lab, Britannica,
PebbleGo, and many more. This has become very helpful by having more small
group rotations in which we can have more entuned personalized learning for our
students. It has also allowed easy research because in elementary school we
often all research a general topic at once and the library only has a certain
number of books available. This gives us all the opportunity to teach using
Britannica and PebbleGo along with books to find accurate information for our
research. Even though we as teachers are also learning aspects of the
technology available, we always have digital support available to us. For every
2 campuses, we are assigned 1 digital support person who comes to our campus 2
days a week but will come more if we have questions about a specific program or
we are taking assessments with the technology and need help.
With the ever-growing technology era, I feel our district has done
an amazing job at understanding that everyone needs access to the same
technology, and with the implementation of 1-1 devices, this is the beginning
of leveling the field with those campuses who normally don’t have as many
resources available compared to others.
References
Michael Cohen Group, LLC. (2016, December). Environmental scan
of educational technology in U.S. public schools. https://www.mcgrc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Report-Environmental-_-Final12.22.2016.pdf
Texas Education Agency. (2023, December 15). Texas Academic
Performance Reports. https://tea.texas.gov/texas-schools/accountability/academic-accountability/performance-reporting/texas-academic-performance-reports
Hi Laura, Wow I thought my campus was big, but it doesn't compare to yours. Our district has been 1:1 for a few years now (since COVID) and it is definitely a game changer. I am always amazed to see how tech savvy our students are and how well the adapt to technology. Because we are a 1:1 district, the majority of assignments are done online, and benchmark testing is also done online through the use of DMAC. This is especially helpful since STAAR 2.0 and TELPAS are now online, so students have plenty of opportunities to learn how to navigate through testing. Thank you for sharing, I always love learning more about other districts and the different things they do in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteErika
It's really commendable that your district has committed to technology in such an encompassing and all-inclusive way. What does professional development look like in your district? Is there a concerted effort to familiarize staff with the use of ed tech? It seems like you use a wide variety of tools to teach. That's wonderful!
ReplyDeleteWe get some basic training at the beginning of the year, but if we have questions about anything we have an IT person who is assigned to our campus and one other local one. She rotates back and forth between us but anything we need help with she will come and teach it to us. I like this better because I find a large percentage of professional development isn't that great when done at a large scale. This way she helps us with exactly what we need help on. So for example one week she did a training with my second grade team about Seesaw, then another week she can't to talk to us about we could find more data on the NWEA Map system we use to help figure out where are students were. She is almost always available.
DeleteIt is so great to hear about how your district is using technology and providing it for students who don't have it!
ReplyDelete