Ineffective edtech? Think again!
Posted on: March 9, 2016
Late last year, the OECD released a report that declared that using educational technology did not guarantee good results.
The press had a field day with it, nay-sayers gleefully taunted “I told you so!”, and anyone associated with enabling change with ICT questioned their lot in life.
Well, this was not quite true for the last group of people.
While some suffered a dent in confidence, other educators moved beyond this argument and focused on what was and still is important: Enabling powerful and meaningful learning by students regardless of results measured only by narrow-beam tests.
The argument that technology does not help is old and invalid.
The press and nay-sayers focused on the negative and forgot to point out that the ineffectiveness could be due to teachers who do not know how to marry new tools with new strategies.
Consider a person with a hammer (old tool) and who is an expert at hammering (old strategy). Now give them a Swiss Army Knife (new set of tools). They might struggle to use the tools (poor strategy) or resort to hammering (using the old strategy regardless of tool affordances).
The argument is old because we already know that for something like a wide range of ICTs to be effective, there must be broad acceptance, regular use, and rigorous professional development. There must be changes in teaching behaviours before we try measuring the effectiveness of ICT.
How you measure effectiveness is also important. Schools and the OECD used tests. Do these test for knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are a result of ICT-enabled learning? For example, are the tests open, collaborative, and Google-enabled?
No, they are not. It is like the tests are designed to measure how someone can run in a straight line when you actually need to determine how well they can climb up a tree. The body motions look similar when the person is miming the actions, but climbing is very different from running. The tests are simply invalid.
Say no to the nay-sayers because they do not know what they are talking about. I have told you do. Now you tell them so!
Another dot in the blogosphere? 
March 9, 2016 at 5:05 pm
Kwan Tuck Soon: mentioned this in Ineffective #edtech? Think aga…. via twitter.com
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