Suggestions for bringing technological change to a public high school?

Very interesting topic. I’ll be anxious to read all the comments to see how we can make more opportunities and resources available to our students.

Start with a classroom quantity of laptops, work with them for a year and then showcase the way they made a difference in your students’ learning. This is how the MLTI started in the State of Maine. We currently have a laptop in the hands of every 7th and 8th grade student in the state. Next year the Governor wants to expand the program to the High School level.

ask the students! view them as partners and ask what they think they should utilize. The best change comes from a grassroots function – not top down. Also, teacher buy-in is HUGE. Getting them on board by making them feel part of the team is a big step forward.

I think this is a question of budgets and specific needs.

As for budgets, a modest departmental budget could be used to fund specific tools for teachers (such as wi-fi connections to graphic calculators… which most students already have).If the students do not all have access to dedicated, personal technology, then the best bet would be to expand shared resources (such as projectors and computer labs).

I would hold off on spending resources on technology that have not shown to improve student success.

This all, of course, depends on the specific needs of the school and the demographics in question. I have seen technology work wonders and work not at all in both low-income and high-income demographics.

Something to keep in mind:

“One of the enduring difficulties about technology and education,” according to Dr. Martha Stone Wiske, co-director of the Educational Technology Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “is that a lot of people think about the technology first and the education later.” (from: The Impact of Educational Technology on Student Achievement)

Get concrete. You don’t really want to “improve technological opportunities”; that’s manager-speak, and it conceals that you have no specific goals.

Instead, decide what your goals are. Concrete, measurable goals. Like having enough computers, and enough access to computers, that every student who graduates can master word processing skills and use them effectively in their English classes.

Or having enough computers with Mathematica software that all students in Algebra II or higher classes can use to work on graphing, and enough computers with spreadsheet software that students taking statistics or psychology or business math can have access to—with the idea that having access to graphing software and spreadsheet software will enhance the students’ understanding of math.

What are the goals? “Improving technical opportunities” is so vague as to be useless. “Provide students with the word processing skills they are likely to need in the workplace or in college.” There is a concrete goal. “Provide students with software that they can use to explore mathematics so that they have a better understanding of the concepts they learn in class.” There is a concrete goal.