Taking the ‘i21’ initiative: San Diego USD looks to transform teaching and learning through technology
By:
Scott LaFee
Welcome to education’s Technology Revolution, version 2.0.
You remember 1.0. It’s been chugging along for decades, bit by byte, launched with visions of “computer labs” in every school and grand rhetoric about transformation via technology.
The revolution continues, of course, and in many ways it’s been a success. Those quaint old computer labs have virtually gone viral, with electronic learning tools spreading throughout our schools. The national ratio of classroom computers to students is fast approaching one-to-one, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Students now routinely use computers to search the Internet, write reports, design presentations, crunch numbers and make spreadsheets.
The thing is, much of what they know and understand about computers and technology is most likely stuff they didn’t learn in school. While techno-phenomena like YouTube, Facebook, texting and Web surfing have indisputably changed the nature of childhood, technology hasn’t necessarily revolutionized the nature of education. A classroom today looks a lot like a classroom did 20, 50, maybe even 100 years ago. And today’s typical students still generally learn the same way their parents and grandparents did: one teacher discoursing before rows of desk-bound students.
‘Conventional school is like a school bus rolling along the highway, with the teacher standing at the front and pointing out interesting and important sights but telling the passengers that, no, we cannot let you get off to explore what’s down that side road,” Ted Kolderie and Tim McDonald wrote in a 2009 report, “How Information Technology Can Enable 21st Century Schools,” for the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington, D.C.
What’s needed, say Kolderie and McDonald, is a dramatically new (and perhaps radical) vision of how technology can be used to teach, to reform and transform education. Certainly that’s the mantra of the Obama administration, where national school reform plans include development of rigorous new standards for all students everywhere; data systems to track their achievement across their entire academic careers; new systems to recruit, train and retain outstanding teachers; and more school-based programs that promote excellence and innovation.
“Technology will be in play in every aspect of the education reform agenda,” Karen Cator, the director of education technology at the U.S. Department of Education, said in a speech late last year.
The question is: How will education get there?
“Technology advocates have been saying forever that technology will transform learning,” says Keith Krueger, chief executive officer of the Consortium for School Networking, a professional association of school technology leaders. “There’s a lot of cynicism among folks who haven’t seen the transformation.”
If this time is to be different, if this time the school bus called education (to use the obvious metaphor) will actually reach the Promised Land, it’s going to have to take a different route.
One interesting and promising side road goes through San Diego.
This school year, the 133,000-student San Diego Unified School District launched “the i21 initiative,” which advocates say will reinvent the way local children are taught—and which they contend could provide a model for other districts to emulate.
“The San Diego Unified i21 Interactive Classroom is an engaging and personalized learning environment designed to optimize teaching and learning through the interconnected use of auditory, visual, mobile computing and formative assessment technologies across the curriculum,” according to the district’s Web site.
Without doubt, the initiative is ambitious. Over five years, San Diego Unified officials plan to update and equip 7,000 elementary, middle and high school classrooms with 21st century tools: interactive whiteboards, netbooks (133,000 when all is said and done), computer workstations, laptops for teachers, audio-visual systems, student response systems, document cameras, printers and wireless access points. Total cost: $385 million, paid for with proceeds from Proposition S, a $2.1 billion capital improvements bond measure local voters passed in November 2008.
The first phase of i21 began this school year, with 1,300 third- and sixth-grade classrooms, mostly math and science, on the calendar to be upgraded. The work affects more than 25,000 students and teachers.
“In every previous model,” says Darryl LaGace, San Diego Unified’s chief information and technology officer, “the biggest issue has been access. It wasn’t always practical to send kids down the hallway to get time in labs. A core element here is addressing that access issue. Every classroom will come equipped with enough computers for every student.”
Declining equipment costs are a big driver behind SDUSD’s effort (the netbooks cost just $300 each), but providing more and newer hardware is only one part of the initiative. A second element is ongoing professional development based on a relatively new concept called TPACK, for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Developed by Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler at Michigan State University’s College of Education, TPACK emphasizes how content, pedagogy and technology can be overlapped to create more effective educational environments.
A third component is Universal Design for Learning, a program to help teachers adapt their lessons and technological tools to different learning styles.
“The new classrooms allow for providing different forms of learning at different levels, speeds and abilities,” LaGace says. “Kids who are months behind in their reading skills can use technologies like text-to-speech to catch up, something that previously might have only been available in special education classes.
“Meanwhile, other kids are using their computers in other ways, depending upon where their abilities are at. We’re not just equipping classrooms with new machines, we’re changing the way curricula are delivered.”
One notable aspect: All three efforts will be monitored, tracked and recorded, providing a wealth of data to inform district officials about what—and who—is doing well, and what and who needs help.
“This is all about how a district uses its resources, and how well,” notes JoAnn Yee, assistant executive director for organizational development and urban affairs for the California School Boards Association. “You can think about it in terms of another educational effort: class size reduction. That requires a lot of money too. But if you just spend money to lower class size and don’t provide the necessary collateral support to teachers and others, which includes helping them understand how to work more effectively in a smaller classroom, then improvement isn’t necessarily going to happen.”
Tests of time
Beyond the not insignificant challenge of finding the money to actually purchase the necessary equipment (admittedly an even tougher chore for school districts without the San Diego district’s resources), a multitude of philosophical, administrative and logistical factors must be addressed in creating an effective 21st century learning environment:
- What’s the equipment’s intended purpose?
- What kinds of instructional practices will it support or enhance?
- Do existing conditions and cultures in the district and its schools support the introduction and use of this new technology?
- How much training will be needed before teachers and other staff are able to use it effectively?
- How much ongoing professional development will be required in years to come?
- What is the equipment replacement cost on a three- to five-year cycle?
Even after those questions are addressed, the question of sustainability for such a huge investment remains: Will i21 stand the test of time? One key to the answer lies in i21’s provisions for professional development.
“Often in new programs, there’s plenty of training in the beginning, but then people are just cut loose to do their own thing,” Yee says. “If something’s going to work in the long term, there needs to be continued training and regular modifications to reinforce best practices. You have to constantly check to make sure implementation is true to your goals.”
LaGace, the SDUSD technology officer, agrees wholeheartedly.
“We want to make sure i21 isn’t eventually pushed off to the side like an old, out-of-date computer gathering dust on a shelf. We’re devoting a lot of money to different departments to help people think differently about what technology can do,” LaGace says.
“Principals are being trained to help them understand what can be, to help them create a vision. As rooms are equipped, teachers get 39 hours of training on how to effectively use the new technologies, but the plan is to continue that training throughout the school year and into the future. There will be a number of support teachers and teams, working out of different offices, who will go out and coach [to] make sure the tools are being used in the best possible way.”
Most of the money for that will not come from Proposition S funding, however. District officials hope to attract new, additional funding in the form of federal grants.
Beyond tools
To be sure, high-tech tools present almost irresistible possibilities. Take, for example, interactive whiteboards, a major component of the i21 initiative. Linked to the Internet and a projector, the boards promise to be portals to a digitized universe. Teachers and students can manipulate images and words on the boards with a finger or stylus. Changes can be saved to computers, printed or e-mailed home.
“The power of new technology is that it opens an incredible number of doors for teachers to help students learn in the most engaging way,” says Grace Rubenstein, a senior producer with Edutopia, an enterprise of the George Lucas Education Foundation that advocates for high-tech, interactive learning.
“Students can create their own original products, like blogs and videos and photo essays. They can connect and collaborate with kids their age in other schools, states or even countries. And they can publish their work to the public, to peers and local businesspeople and anyone else on the Web, rather than just handing it in for one teacher to see and grade. All of that makes the work feel more exciting and purposeful, and it gives more kids a chance to feel pride of work and ownership. Projects like these are possible without any technology, but much, much harder to arrange.”
Research, albeit early and limited, supports Rubenstein’s view.
In a study conducted during the 2008-09 school year, involving 85 teachers from 170 schools in independent evaluations, education researcher Robert Marzano looked at the impact that ActivClassroom, an array of interconnected educational technologies that includes an interactive whiteboard, teaching software and student response systems, had on student achievement. ActivClassroom is a product of Promethean, an international firm that funded the study.
According to Marzano, the use of interactive whiteboards—IWBs—produced an almost immediate 17-percentile gain in test scores, meaning students at the 50th percentile jumped to the 67th percentile when taught by a teacher using an IWB.
Students improved even more—a 20-percentile jump, on average—if their teachers had 20 to 30 months of experience with IWBs. Maximum student performance occurred, according to Marzano, when experienced teachers with specific IWB training had at least two years of experience with whiteboards and used them 75 percent of the time in class. Students in these classes showed a 29-percentile jump in test scores.
But Marzano cautioned in his study that there could be too much of a good thing. Too much reliance whiteboards adversely impacted human interaction and produced little or no academic improvement among students, Marzano found.
Similarly, weak teachers who received little or no training in how to effectively use IWBs remained—well, weak teachers. Technology is no magic bullet.
For example, in some schools observed by Marzano and colleagues, students used handheld voting devices to respond to questions from teachers. The percentage of students answering correctly was immediately displayed on whiteboards as a bar graph or pie chart. Using the devices tended to boost student participation and achievement, but in some classrooms, Marzano found, that’s where it ended. Teachers simply noted how many students got the right answer and did not probe further into why one answer was more appropriate than another.
Content remains king. Teachers who knew what they needed to teach, and used whiteboards, netbooks and other tools to help them effectively teach it, clearly excelled, according to Marzano. These teachers did not rely upon technology to compensate for teaching inadequacies. They did not, for example, overuse visuals, which can be dazzling but overwhelming, or gimmicks like canned applause, a feature that can be used to reinforce correct choices but can prove distracting and silly.
It’s a point with which Tracy Gray, managing director of the Center for Implementing Technology in Education, readily agrees.
“What kids are learning and must learn to live and function well in the 21st century is hugely different than what it was just a generation ago,” says Gray, “and it’s constantly changing. This isn’t about the tools of technology. They’re just tools. It’s about teaching children how to think critically, how to sort through the huge amount of information they now have access to so that they know how to make smart, informed decisions and choices.”
It remains to be seen whether San Diego Unified’s huge investment in one vision of 21st century education will pay off. The experiment isn’t even a year old yet. But LaGace, the district technology officer, is confident his metaphorical school bus is on the right track.
“The early indications have been good,” says LaGace. “With training, teachers feel confident using the new tools. And when you walk into a classroom, you can see all of the students really engaged. The general consensus is excitement, that this is all a welcome breath of fresh air that can really change learning and schools.”
Scott LaFee is a regular contributor to California Schools.
i21: research and resources
Reams have been written on technology and education. Here are a few resources directly related to the San Diego Unified School District’s i21 program:
This San Diego Unified Web site offers a glimpse at the hardware being used in the district’s program.
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank offers one vision of how technology can be used to reform and transform education.
Founded in the fall of 2001, this association representing state directors for educational technology has information related to its goal of improving student achievement through technology.
This special report on i21 is just one example of the print and online news coverage of education technology provided by this self-described “marketing solutions company serving the education technology industry.”
SITE is a society of the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, an international educational and professional organization dedicated to the advancement of the knowledge, theory and quality of learning and teaching at all levels with information technology.
—Brian Taylor