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Technology Planning for Digital Learning

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Technology Planning for Digital Learning

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As my district's technology director, I love getting the maximum bang for my buck. Maybe it's because as a former classroom teacher, I know of other ways to spend money than on wires and chips. It could be that my midwestern hardheadedness insists that only fools use two mules when one mule will do. And I know it's a deep-seated distrust of anybody who wants to make a profit selling to schools.

Schools in the United States spend a lot of money on education technology-estimated soon to be $56 billion dollars-36 percent of which is spent in K-12 education. That's about $400 per student per year.

As district budgets shrink, technology departments will most certainly be affected. Here are 10 strategies to help you make the most of your technology dollar.

1. Use effective budgeting techniques.

Finance in schools is a zero-sum game. Districts have a finite amount of money, so any funds expended on technology are funds not spent to reduce class sizes, buy science lab equipment, or train teachers. Good technology budgets should not be just practical, but moral as well, clearly showing how every dollar spent directly or indirectly improves educational opportunities for students.

Is specific. I do zero-based budgeting every year. This means starting from scratch and itemizing every technology expense that the district needs to cover in the coming school year.

A well-thought-out budget will improve the use of technology in a district, even if the technology you ask for is not fully funded. Relating expenditures to goals, prioritizing purchases, and soliciting stakeholder input ensure that money will not just be well spent, but best spent.

2. Take advantage of the (buying) power of groups.

Although technology products and services can be expensive, the industry is also intensely competitive. Savvy educators can use that competitive environment to their advantage.

For any purchase over a few dollars, getting two or more quotes should be standard operating procedure. Minnesota requires us to go through a formal closed bid process for any procurement over $100,000.

Intermediate service agencies, such as Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, often offer consortium purchasing of goods and services. Our district takes advantage of discounted costs for Internet connectivity, educational resource subscriptions, and hardware purchases provided by our regional telecommunications cooperative. State government contracts can provide discounted costs for equipment and may eliminate the legal need for getting quotes or bids on products. Districts can even take advantage of group discounts by entering into a districtwide contract for resources rather than having each building purchase them separately.

3. Practice sustainable technology.

Not purchasing more technology than a school can regularly maintain, upgrade, and replace. For example, let's say that Johnson Middle School has 500 students and 20 classrooms. We want a computer in each of our classrooms (20) and a 4:1 student to computer ratio throughout the school (125). That's 145 computers in all.Computers much more than five years old become unreliable. If we're going to replace our computers every five years, we need to purchase 20 percent of them new each year. Therefore, our annual computer budget needs to be .20 replacement rate × 145 computers × $1,000-or $29,000-this year and every year from now on. If you don't maintain the technology, you get unreliable computers that teachers won't use.

Do not keep computers going that are at end of life. Once a computer is more than five years old, we don't fix it. Put the old machines that will be recycled when they break into non-mission-critical places.

4. Purchase the right tool for the right job.

My rule of thumb was always that you should buy as powerful a machine as you could afford to keep it from becoming obsolete. My motto was, "You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much bandwidth." But things are changing.

Computer speed, processing memory, and hard-drive capacity have reached the point where even fairly low-end machines are fast enough for most purposes. You can add memory to most computers when you need it, and servers are becoming scalable. Bandwidth can be monitored and regulated with packet shapers. My new rule? Buy what you need for today's purposes-but make sure it can be upgraded.

5. Take advantage of free software.

One "free" technology to think very carefully about is donated equipment. Many businesses and individuals with the best of intentions offer to give computers and other equipment to schools. Too often the equipment is old, incompatible, or in need of repair and licensure. Unless your school really needs the items and the items have at least two years of life left, pass on the offer and avoid the recycling fee.

6. Head to the cloud.

Cloud computing relies on applications and file storage that reside on the Internet, with minimal resources stored on the local computer's hard drive. A major advantage, then, of cloud computing is that you can work on any project anywhere, regardless of the computer you're using.

But cost savings are also important. Unlike software that resides on computer hard drives, web-based applications are often provided at no cost to the user. Tools such as Google Apps for Education often have a surprisingly full feature set and are compatible with commercial programs.

You can lower your school district's computing costs by using inexpensive computers just to access the cloud. Netbooks are inexpensive, and file storage and basic applications are free. Just out are netbooks that run the Chrome operating system; these require virtually no maintenance, lowering support costs.

I estimate that by using Google Apps for Education, our district of 7,300 students and 3,000 computers saves about $200,000 a year in hardware, software, storage, printing, and support costs.

7. Enforce standardization through single-point purchasing.

As a rule, I'm against education monocultures. I've yet to see one activity, one teaching style, or even one type of schooling that works for everyone.

The only way to create such standardization is by having an enforced policy that states that all technology purchases need to be made through a single department.

8. Maximize your E-Rate funding.

For the past dozen years, the Universal Service Fund (E-Rate) has made a major contribution in helping many school districts, including ours, pay their technology bills. Administered by the Federal Communications Commission, the applications, regulations, and allowable services are all rather byzantine and make federal income tax guidelines seem like a Dick and Jane primer in comparison.

9. Stop supporting obsolete technologies.

I just felt a great collective shudder in Education Land from those of us who use and value these resources. Budgets, however, need to focus on technologies that still have a long life span, not prop up those that are dying.

10. Provide sufficient training.

How can you make the most powerful and expensive technology worth absolutely nothing? Drop it? Spill coffee on it? Let an 8th grader hack into it? Perhaps, but a far more effective way is to buy a new system, hardware, or software and not provide sufficient training.

If serious, formal training isn't part of your technology budget, don't worry much about the rest of it. The shiny things won't get used well anyway.

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Stretching Your Technology Dollar - ASCD

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As my district's technology director, I love getting the maximum bang for my buck. Maybe it's because as a former classroom teacher, I know of other ways to spend money than on wires and chips. It could be that my midwestern hardheadedness insists that only fools use two mules when one mule will do.

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Budgeting and Funding School Technology: Essential Considerations

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Budgeting and Funding School Technology: Essential Considerations

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Publication Date: 2010-Sep

Budgeting and Funding School Technology: Essential Considerations

School Business Affairs, v76 n7 p18-20, 22 Sep 2010

School districts need adequate financial resources to purchase hardware and software, wire their buildings to network computers and other information and communication devices, and connect to the Internet to provide students, teachers, and other school personnel with adequate access to technology. Computers and other peripherals, particularly, require large expenditures every three to five years, a requirement not usually considered in education planning and budgeting. School leaders should be able to estimate the total cost of purchasing and maintaining an adequate technology network in classrooms and throughout the district, including costs related to support, professional development, hardware, software, replacement, connectivity, and retrofitting. Calculating and assessing this total cost of ownership (TCO) help organizations make intelligent purchasing decisions that factor in expenses required beyond the cost of the hardware. This article discusses some essential considerations in budgeting and funding school technology.

Descriptors: Purchasing, Computer Software, Educational Technology, Information Technology, Budgeting, School Districts, Life Cycle Costing, Faculty Development, Networks, Academic Achievement, Technology, Technology Integration, Computers, Computer Networks, Financial Support

Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO). 11401 North Shore Drive, Reston, VA 20190. Tel: 866-682-2729; Fax: 703-478-0205; e-mail: asboreq@asbointl.org; Web site: http://www.asbointl.org

Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive

Authoring Institution: N/A

Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A

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ERIC - EJ914657 - Budgeting and Funding School Technology: Essential Considerations, School Business Affairs, 2010-Sep

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School districts need adequate financial resources to purchase hardware and software, wire their buildings to network computers and other information and communication devices, and connect to the Internet to provide students, teachers, and other school personnel with adequate access to technology.

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Funding Digital Learning - Office of Educational Technology

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They also should consider all possibilities for creative funding of these programs. Leaders should consider technology an ongoing, line-item expense from the very beginning of planning technology implementation. U.S. Department of Education Funds Other Federal Funds

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10X: Using Technology to Engage Families

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10X: Using Technology to Engage Families

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10X: Using Technology to Engage Families

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Here are 10 tips on using technology to engage families that support their young children's early learning and strengthen home-school relationships.

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Parent Involvement, Technology, and Media: Now What?

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Parent Involvement, Technology, and Media: Now What?

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Increasing Family Involvement with the Use of Technology

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Increasing Family Involvement with the Use of Technology

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by Terry Heick

It’s possible that there is no time in the history of education that our systems of educating have been so out of touch with the communities. Growing populations, shifting communities, and increasingly inwardly-focused schools all play a role.

In light of the access of modern technology, social media, and new learning models that reconfigure the time and place learning happens, it doesn’t have to be that way. Schools can evolve while simultaneously growing closer to the people they serve.

First, for the purpose of this post let’s think of technology and social media as distinct.

Technology has many forms, but in education, it is most visible in terms of computing hardware and software. The hardware is pretty obvious—phones, wearable technology from Apple and Android, iPads, personal computers, Macs, Chromebooks, graphing calculators, and the like.

The software is a bit more inconspicuous because it’s embedded in the hardware. Here we have fundamental PC software like Microsoft Windows or Mac OS; we have productivity suites like Microsoft Office; we have web browsers like Google Chrome or Safari or Firefox; and we have niche programs like reading assessment tools or educational games, which function like what we’d now consider computer-based apps.

There are also less visible forms of technology that make teaching and learning with technology possible, including electricity (you take it for granted until it doesn’t work) WiFi (imagine your classroom looking like it does behind your television—wires everywhere), the cloud (which enables mobile learning, hardware sharing, flipped classrooms, and other advances), and more. Each of these technology tools is critical in their own way, working together to make whatever we’d define as a ‘modern classroom‘ and ‘modern learning‘ work.

But hidden with this list is one bit of seemingly dated software that can be concept-mapped on its own in a million other directions of possibility. No one gets excited by it, but it still makes the internet go: the web browser.

Although itself just a program that translates html code to visual information, the modern web browser has become a vessel that everything else attaches itself to. For schools looking to connect with communities, it also actuates social media channels like Instagram, twitter, facebook, and pinterest, and allows for the blogging or site updates that keep parents informed.

None of this is new, really. The technology has been there for years. Parents have always been ‘informed’—but of what? That’s where there is potential. What we’re communicating as educators, when, and why.

So what can social media ‘do’?

Solicit mentoring relationships

Whether organized by a district, school, teacher, family, or the student themselves, connecting with potential mentors through social media is compelling because it’s A) Public—transparent and safer than ‘social media’ sounds and B) Because it’s public, it can encourage companies to respond when they may not in private.

Connecting students to the artists, architects, engineers, makers, writers, farmers, cooks, and other ‘roles’ for the purpose of mentoring and apprenticeship is one way to begin to repair the disconnect between schools and communities.

This one is closely related to the idea of ‘mentoring’ in the sense that it connects students with people outside of the classroom from their community. But rather than for the purpose of mentoring, it could be less involved—topical but authentic communication between those leading the community, and those living in it, and social media is the perfect way to make it happen.

Ideally authentic products and artifacts produced through new skills and knowledge useful to people and communities.

Want work to leave the classroom? Use social media to publish it with the world. Worried about privacy? Assign students anonymous codes or avatars to publish under. Used closed communities (Facebook Groups, for example) that, while not fully open, are still school-wide. There are ways.

Curate cultural artifacts and ‘local memory’

Today, museums do the work of ‘curating,’ but that’s a crude way to preserve the cultural artifacts that matter. Why can’t schools do this? And why can’t technology be used to streamline and crowdsource it?

How To Connect Schools And Communities Using Technology

In addition to connecting with the world students live and breathe in, new learning models afforded by technology are also useful in reconnecting with families, neighborhoods, and native places students have affection for.

Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom is one way to exchange where learning happens—or at least what kind of learning happens where. Here, the roles are reversed: Students are exposed to content at home and practice it at school.

Mobile learning

Mobile learning is a brilliant way to immerse students in native places and landscapes. The challenge here is that education isn’t quite ready for it, but if you can figure it out, the possibilities are extraordinary: Deep integration of learning, place, and people.

Place-based education

See above—learning that is based on place and not an indexed set of nationalized curriculum. Authentic, familiar, and personal.

Project-based learning

Project-based learning can incorporate all of the above—flipped classrooms, place-based learning, mobile learning, and so on. The idea is that teaching and learning are anchored through the process of authentic projects constructed over time. These ‘reason’ or ‘need to know’ for these projects will ideally both start and finish in communities.

Experiential learning/Scenario-based learning

Treat the school like a think tank. Explore and address local community issues. Use social media to connect with families and neighborhoods and businesses and organizations, then use problem-based or scenario-based learning to address them.

Conclusion

Technology, so far, hasn’t healed the disconnect between schools and communities, but that could be because we’re selling it short for what it can do—which might start with not seeing its potential fully. Today, popular uses are sharing grades, missing work, test dates, snow days, and basic school announcements. This isn’t nearly good enough.

Whether you’re talking about hardware, software, social media, or something in between, more than anything else, technology connects. As educators, we just need to be intentional about what we’re connecting, and why.

image attribution flickr user usdepartmentofeducation; how to connect schools and communities

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Fostering Tech Tools through Community Outreach

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Fostering Tech Tools through Community Outreach

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2018 Impact Awards

Fostering Tech Skills Through Community Outreach

A program at the University of Texas at El Paso is transforming the K-industry pipeline through hands-on STEAM experiences - and giving college students a chance to contribute to local schools.

Category: Teaching and Learning

Institution: The University of Texas at El Paso

Project: Tech-E Outreach Program

Project lead: Michael Pitcher, director of Academic Technologies Learning Environments

In UT-El Paso's Tech-E outreach program, college students serve as mentors and guides on the side for local K-12 students.

Sometimes, doing something for others delivers just as much impact for the doer as for the recipient. That has been the case for the University of Texas at El Paso, which reached out to local K-12 schools to provide a week-long technical summer camp for students without other options and ended up with a program that runs year-round and educates 50,000 students a year. Tech-E ("techie") Outreach, as it's named, has also helped the college students involved to gain confidence in soft skills, boosted their understanding of technical content and provided a way for them to feel like they're already contributing in their chosen fields.

From Modest Beginnings

According to Michael Pitcher, director of Academic Technologies, and Pedro Espinoza, instructional technologist, a departmental conversation about how college students often struggle with issues related to self-esteem and soft skills led to talking about how the kids in their city face similar problems. Often, kids might be great at computer science or engineering, but didn't necessarily believe they had what it takes to succeed - especially when their families couldn't afford to send them to a summer camp where they might develop those skills. As a group, the people around the table decided they'd volunteer their time and run their own camp for a week.

Outreach to area teachers unstoppered a hidden need. "We were thinking that if we got 12 kids, we'd be ecstatic," recalled Pitcher. "A ton of people applied." In response, the group opened two additional camps that summer. And by the following December, teachers were already lining up with new candidates for the following summer. By February the upcoming camps were filled up too, and there was a wait list.

And then, the team fielded interest at the district level. School leaders saw what the students were like who had been exposed to the camps, and the school system was interested in piloting a program delivered for the whole school year. While Pitcher and his group envisioned testing out the idea on a single school and maybe 75 students, the district had a different idea: bringing in 400 students. "We asked ourselves, how can we grow this? We sat down for a long couple of days and nights, and we said, 'OK, let's do this.'" The program was formalized; funding issues were hammered out; and it became part of the rotation for people in the Academic Technologies division, which recruited student volunteers to help deliver the content.

Months later, the district decided it wanted to add a second cohort, and then a third. And it suggested turning the year of training into a multi-year program that would continue growing ever after, all the way from second grade to the end of college.

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Fostering Tech Skills Through Community Outreach -- Campus Technology

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2018 Impact Awards A program at the University of Texas at El Paso is transforming the K-industry pipeline through hands-on STEAM experiences - and giving college students a chance to contribute to local schools.

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Digital Literacy Through Community Outreach

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Digital Literacy Through Community Outreach

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Digital Literacy Through Community Outreach

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Digital Literacy Through Community Outreach

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Digital literacy is a skill that impacts not only the students in our school district, but the entire community. Jobs require a certain level of savviness when it comes to technology, and all people w

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School Website

Schools are busy places, and parents need a trusted place to find the right information. But information is not enough -- gone are the days of the website being just a digital brochure. Now it needs to facilitate two-way communication. We just updated our website this year to include these key features:

1. It must be mobile friendly. It must work on phones and tablets as well as desktops. No exceptions.

2. It must be easy to update, preferably automatically. For example, the information we add into our Google calendar automatically updates on our website. For static pages, make sure the content stays current.

3. Link your other social media initiatives on your website. Parents should be able to easily find your official Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube profiles from your webpage. Then use your webpage to share the content from those profiles.

4. The hardest but most important part is that your site must provide a sense of your school's culture. People visiting your school website should feel like they are visiting your campus.

Facebook

Peter Sutton told me in a workshop that "if you are not telling your school's story on Facebook, someone else is." He was right. When I checked, I found that a student had already set up a Facebook page with our name.

Use Facebook to celebrate the great things happening at the school!

Promote sports, arts, and cultural events.

Post blog articles, news items, and announcements.

Publish fundraising goals.

Share educational memes.

Should you use Facebook ads? We found good success in promoting our posts. For a minimal cost, it places them into the top of the timelines for your friends and their friends.

Be sure to monitor your posts. Which posts have more views and likes than others? While it isn't a popularity contest, you want to keep track of whether you are actually reaching your audience. Have more than one person as admin, but don't bring in too many people. Make sure they answer comments and direct messages. What happens when you get a bad comment? If it is inappropriate, we delete it. If it challenges or disagrees with us, we use it as an opportunity to educate and inform both the poster and the public. We will follow this with a private message inviting them to come in and discuss the issue. We also fully support Facebook's requirement that users be 13 or older.

Twitter

Our teachers use Twitter to celebrate what they are doing in their classrooms, ask questions, share resources, and document their learning. It's had a profound effect on our staff. By creating a school hashtag, we are able to thread all of our school-based tweets. I used to think I needed some kind of official Twitter authorization to create a hashtag. You don't. Just make a memorable one that describes your school, and start using it. Twitter use by our staff grew slowly at first. Then we compiled all of the tweets onto our internal digital daily bulletin using our #TISMacao hashtag, and it allowed non-Twitter users to see all of the posts. Twitter use is growing rapidly now! See this blog article for more details. Also, see how staff members Zack Palmer, Louise Phinney, and Nick Chignall are using Twitter.

We are just starting to explore engaging our parents and local community with Twitter, as well as reaching out to a global audience.

LinkedIn

At this point, we use LinkedIn to recruit potential teachers and reach the working members of our TIS families. We follow the major employers in our area and develop our networks within the business community. In addition to posting about major school events, we also share articles related to leadership, corporate social responsibility, and team building. We use it to announce our corporate fundraising, sponsorships, and partnerships. We post much differently on LinkedIn than we do on Facebook.

YouTube

I can guarantee that there are already many videos of your school and students on YouTube. Once again, if you are not telling your story, someone else is. Since you may not be able to police the other videos, you should have an official YouTube channel. Check us out on YouTube!

WeChat

A popular platform in Asia, WeChat is the medium TIS uses to connect with our Chinese-speaking families.

Blogs

Remember that old newsletter? We don't have it anymore. At first, we switched to a digital PDF version, but then we got rid of that as well. Now our news is a blog, constantly updated -- we post articles and announcements as they are written. Every teacher has his or her own blog. Administrators have blogs, as we try to lead by example. Our next step is to engage further through integrating our blogs with social media.

Overall, our move toward digital engagement has been successful. Our community is much more connected. Our parents stay informed through our website and Facebook. Our teachers interact and share through Twitter, and we continue to seek new ways to engage our community through the tools that are available to us.

How about you? What ways are you engaging your school community? Which issues concern you about social media?

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Engaging Your School Community Through Social Media

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Schools are busy places, and parents need a trusted place to find the right information. But information is not enough -- gone are the days of the website being just a digital brochure. Now it needs to facilitate two-way communication. We just updated our website this year to include these key features: It must be mobile friendly.

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Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?

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Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?

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How can education technology improve learning for all?

Leading up to the 75th anniversary of the UN General Assembly, this "Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?" publication kicks off the Center for Universal Education's first playbook in a series to help improve education around the world.

It is intended as an evidence-based tool for ministries of education, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, to adopt and more successfully invest in education technology.

While there is no single education initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere-as school systems differ in learners and educators, as well as in the availability and quality of materials and technologies-an important first step is understanding how technology is used given specific local contexts and needs.

The surveys in this playbook are designed to be adapted to collect this information from educators, learners, and school leaders and guide decisionmakers in expanding the use of technology.

While technology has disrupted most sectors of the economy and changed how we communicate, access information, work, and even play, its impact on schools, teaching, and learning has been much more limited. We believe that this limited impact is primarily due to technology being been used to replace analog tools, without much consideration given to playing to technology's comparative advantages. These comparative advantages, relative to traditional "chalk-and-talk" classroom instruction, include helping to scale up standardized instruction, facilitate differentiated instruction, expand opportunities for practice, and increase student engagement. When schools use technology to enhance the work of educators and to improve the quality and quantity of educational content, learners will thrive.

Further, COVID-19 has laid bare that, in today's environment where pandemics and the effects of climate change are likely to occur, schools cannot always provide in-person education-making the case for investing in education technology.

Here we argue for a simple yet surprisingly rare approach to education technology that seeks to:

1. Understand the needs, infrastructure, and capacity of a school system-the diagnosis;

2. Survey the best available evidence on interventions that match those conditions-the evidence; and

3. Closely monitor the results of innovations before they are scaled up-the prognosis.

Our approach builds on a simple yet intuitive theoretical framework created two decades ago by two of the most prominent education researchers in the United States, David K. Cohen and Deborah Loewenberg Ball. They argue that what matters most to improve learning is the interactions among educators and learners around educational materials. We believe that the failed school-improvement efforts in the U.S. that motivated Cohen and Ball's framework resemble the ed-tech reforms in much of the developing world to date in the lack of clarity improving the interactions between educators, learners, and the educational material. We build on their framework by adding parents as key agents that mediate the relationships between learners and educators and the material (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The instructional core
Adapted from Cohen and Ball (1999)
As the figure above suggests, ed-tech interventions can affect the instructional core in a myriad of ways. Yet, just because technology can do something, it does not mean it should. School systems in developing countries differ along many dimensions and each system is likely to have different needs for ed-tech interventions, as well as different infrastructure and capacity to enact such interventions.

How can school systems assess their needs and preparedness?

A useful first step for any school system to determine whether it should invest in education technology is to diagnose its:

1. Specific needs to improve student learning (e.g., raising the average level of achievement, remediating gaps among low performers, and challenging high performers to develop higher-order skills);

2. Infrastructure to adopt technology-enabled solutions (e.g., electricity connection, availability of space and outlets, stock of computers, and Internet connectivity at school and at learners' homes); and

3. Capacity to integrate technology in the instructional process (e.g., learners' and educators' level of familiarity and comfort with hardware and software, their beliefs about the level of usefulness of technology for learning purposes, and their current uses of such technology).

Before engaging in any new data collection exercise, school systems should take full advantage of existing administrative data that could shed light on these three main questions. This could be in the form of internal evaluations but also international learner assessments, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and/or the Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS). But if school systems lack information on their preparedness for ed-tech reforms or if they seek to complement existing data with a richer set of indicators, we developed a set of surveys for learners, educators, and school leaders. Download the full report to see how we map out the main aspects covered by these surveys, in hopes of highlighting how they could be used to inform decisions around the adoption of ed-tech interventions.

How can school systems identify promising ed-tech interventions?

There is no single "ed-tech" initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere, simply because school systems differ in learners and educators, as well as in the availability and quality of materials and technologies. Instead, to realize the potential of education technology to accelerate student learning, decisionmakers should focus on four potential uses of technology that play to its comparative advantages and complement the work of educators to accelerate student learning (Figure 2). These comparative advantages include:

1. Scaling up quality instruction, such as through prerecorded quality lessons.

2. Facilitating differentiated instruction, through, for example, computer-adaptive learning and live one-on-one tutoring.

3. Expanding opportunities to practice.

4. Increasing learner engagement through videos and games.

Figure 2: Comparative advantages of technology
Adapted from Cohen and Ball (1999)
Here we review the evidence on ed-tech interventions from 37 studies in 20 countries*, organizing them by comparative advantage. It's important to note that ours is not the only way to classify these interventions (e.g., video tutorials could be considered as a strategy to scale up instruction or increase learner engagement), but we believe it may be useful to highlight the needs that they could address and why technology is well positioned to do so.

When discussing specific studies, we report the magnitude of the effects of interventions using standard deviations (SDs). SDs are a widely used metric in research to express the effect of a program or policy with respect to a business-as-usual condition (e.g., test scores). There are several ways to make sense of them. One is to categorize the magnitude of the effects based on the results of impact evaluations. In developing countries, effects below 0.1 SDs are considered to be small, effects between 0.1 and 0.2 SDs are medium, and those above 0.2 SDs are large (for reviews that estimate the average effect of groups of interventions, called "meta analyses," see e.g., Conn, 2017; Kremer, Brannen, & Glennerster, 2013; McEwan, 2014; Snilstveit et al., 2015; Evans & Yuan, 2020.)

*In surveying the evidence, we began by compiling studies from prior general and ed-tech specific evidence reviews that some of us have written and from ed-tech reviews conducted by others. Then, we tracked the studies cited by the ones we had previously read and reviewed those, as well. In identifying studies for inclusion, we focused on experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations of education technology interventions from pre-school to secondary school in low- and middle-income countries that were released between 2000 and 2020. We only included interventions that sought to improve student learning directly (i.e., students' interaction with the material), as opposed to interventions that have impacted achievement indirectly, by reducing teacher absence or increasing parental engagement. This process yielded 37 studies in 20 countries (see the full list of studies in Appendix B).

Scaling up standardized instruction

One of the ways in which technology may improve the quality of education is through its capacity to deliver standardized quality content at scale. This feature of technology may be particularly useful in three types of settings: (a) those in "hard-to-staff" schools (i.e., schools that struggle to recruit educators with the requisite training and experience-typically, in rural and/or remote areas) (see, e.g., Urquiola & Vegas, 2005); (b) those in which many educators are frequently absent from school (e.g., Chaudhury, Hammer, Kremer, Muralidharan, & Rogers, 2006; Muralidharan, Das, Holla, & Mohpal, 2017); and/or (c) those in which educators have low levels of pedagogical and subject matter expertise (e.g., Bietenbeck, Piopiunik, & Wiederhold, 2018; Bold et al., 2017; Metzler & Woessmann, 2012; Santibañez, 2006) and do not have opportunities to observe and receive feedback (e.g., Bruns, Costa, & Cunha, 2018; Cilliers, Fleisch, Prinsloo, & Taylor, 2018). Technology could address this problem by: (a) disseminating lessons delivered by qualified educators to a large number of learners (e.g., through prerecorded or live lessons); (b) enabling distance education (e.g., for learners in remote areas and/or during periods of school closures); and (c) distributing hardware preloaded with educational materials.

Technology seems to be well placed to amplify the impact of effective educators by disseminating their lessons. Evidence on the impact of prerecorded lessons is encouraging, but not conclusive. Some initiatives that have used short instructional videos to complement regular instruction, in conjunction with other learning materials, have raised student learning on independent assessments. For example, Beg et al. (2020) evaluated an initiative in Punjab, Pakistan in which grade 8 classrooms received an intervention that included short videos to substitute live instruction, quizzes for learners to practice the material from every lesson, tablets for educators to learn the material and follow the lesson, and LED screens to project the videos onto a classroom screen. After six months, the intervention improved the performance of learners on independent tests of math and science by 0.19 and 0.24 SDs, respectively but had no discernible effect on the math and science section of Punjab's high-stakes exams.

One study suggests that approaches that are far less technologically sophisticated can also improve learning outcomes-especially, if the business-as-usual instruction is of low quality. For example, Naslund-Hadley, Parker, and Hernandez-Agramonte (2014) evaluated a preschool math program in Cordillera, Paraguay that used audio segments and written materials four days per week for an hour per day during the school day. After five months, the intervention improved math scores by 0.16 SDs, narrowing gaps between low- and high-achieving learners, and between those with and without educators with formal training in early childhood education.

Yet, the integration of prerecorded material into regular instruction has not always been successful. For example, de Barros (2020) evaluated an intervention that combined instructional videos for math and science with infrastructure upgrades (e.g., two "smart" classrooms, two TVs, and two tablets), printed workbooks for students, and in-service training for educators of learners in grades 9 and 10 in Haryana, India (all materials were mapped onto the official curriculum). After 11 months, the intervention negatively impacted math achievement (by 0.08 SDs) and had no effect on science (with respect to business as usual classes). It reduced the share of lesson time that educators devoted to instruction and negatively impacted an index of instructional quality. Likewise, Seo (2017) evaluated several combinations of infrastructure (solar lights and TVs) and prerecorded videos (in English and/or bilingual) for grade 11 students in northern Tanzania and found that none of the variants improved student learning, even when the videos were used. The study reports effects from the infrastructure component across variants, but as others have noted (Muralidharan, Romero, & Wüthrich, 2019), this approach to estimating impact is problematic.

A very similar intervention delivered after school hours, however, had sizeable effects on learners' basic skills. Chiplunkar, Dhar, and Nagesh (2020) evaluated an initiative in Chennai (the capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu, India) delivered by the same organization as above that combined short videos that explained key concepts in math and science with worksheets, facilitator-led instruction, small groups for peer-to-peer learning, and occasional career counseling and guidance for grade 9 students. These lessons took place after school for one hour, five times a week. After 10 months, it had large effects on learners' achievement as measured by tests of basic skills in math and reading, but no effect on a standardized high-stakes test in grade 10 or socio-emotional skills (e.g., teamwork, decisionmaking, and communication).

Drawing general lessons from this body of research is challenging for at least two reasons. First, all of the studies above have evaluated the impact of prerecorded lessons combined with several other components (e.g., hardware, print materials, or other activities). Therefore, it is possible that the effects found are due to these additional components, rather than to the recordings themselves, or to the interaction between the two (see Muralidharan, 2017 for a discussion of the challenges of interpreting "bundled" interventions). Second, while these studies evaluate some type of prerecorded lessons, none examines the content of such lessons. Thus, it seems entirely plausible that the direction and magnitude of the effects depends largely on the quality of the recordings (e.g., the expertise of the educator recording it, the amount of preparation that went into planning the recording, and its alignment with best teaching practices).

These studies also raise three important questions worth exploring in future research. One of them is why none of the interventions discussed above had effects on high-stakes exams, even if their materials are typically mapped onto the official curriculum. It is possible that the official curricula are simply too challenging for learners in these settings, who are several grade levels behind expectations and who often need to reinforce basic skills (see Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). Another question is whether these interventions have long-term effects on teaching practices. It seems plausible that, if these interventions are deployed in contexts with low teaching quality, educators may learn something from watching the videos or listening to the recordings with learners. Yet another question is whether these interventions make it easier for schools to deliver instruction to learners whose native language is other than the official medium of instruction.

Technology can also allow learners living in remote areas to access education. The evidence on these initiatives is encouraging. For example, Johnston and Ksoll (2017) evaluated a program that broadcasted live instruction via satellite to rural primary school students in the Volta and Greater Accra regions of Ghana. For this purpose, the program also equipped classrooms with the technology needed to connect to a studio in Accra, including solar panels, a satellite modem, a projector, a webcam, microphones, and a computer with interactive software. After two years, the intervention improved the numeracy scores of students in grades 2 through 4, and some foundational literacy tasks, but it had no effect on attendance or classroom time devoted to instruction, as captured by school visits. The authors interpreted these results as suggesting that the gains in achievement may be due to improving the quality of instruction that children received (as opposed to increased instructional time). Naik, Chitre, Bhalla, and Rajan (2019) evaluated a similar program in the Indian state of Karnataka and also found positive effects on learning outcomes, but it is not clear whether those effects are due to the program or due to differences in the groups of students they compared to estimate the impact of the initiative.

In one context (Mexico), this type of distance education had positive long-term effects. Navarro-Sola (2019) took advantage of the staggered rollout of the telesecundarias (i.e., middle schools with lessons broadcasted through satellite TV) in 1968 to estimate its impact. The policy had short-term effects on students' enrollment in school: For every telesecundaria per 50 children, 10 students enrolled in middle school and two pursued further education. It also had a long-term influence on the educational and employment trajectory of its graduates. Each additional year of education induced by the policy increased average income by nearly 18 percent. This effect was attributable to more graduates entering the labor force and shifting from agriculture and the informal sector. Similarly, Fabregas (2019) leveraged a later expansion of this policy in 1993 and found that each additional telesecundaria per 1,000 adolescents led to an average increase of 0.2 years of education, and a decline in fertility for women, but no conclusive evidence of long-term effects on labor market outcomes.

It is crucial to interpret these results keeping in mind the settings where the interventions were implemented. As we mention above, part of the reason why they have proven effective is that the "counterfactual" conditions for learning (i.e., what would have happened to learners in the absence of such programs) was either to not have access to schooling or to be exposed to low-quality instruction. School systems interested in taking up similar interventions should assess the extent to which their learners (or parts of their learner population) find themselves in similar conditions to the subjects of the studies above. This illustrates the importance of assessing the needs of a system before reviewing the evidence.

Technology also seems well positioned to disseminate educational materials. Specifically, hardware (e.g., desktop computers, laptops, or tablets) could also help deliver educational software (e.g., word processing, reference texts, and/or games). In theory, these materials could not only undergo a quality assurance review (e.g., by curriculum specialists and educators), but also draw on the interactions with learners for adjustments (e.g., identifying areas needing reinforcement) and enable interactions between learners and educators.

In practice, however, most initiatives that have provided learners with free computers, laptops, and netbooks do not leverage any of the opportunities mentioned above. Instead, they install a standard set of educational materials and hope that learners find them helpful enough to take them up on their own. Students rarely do so, and instead use the laptops for recreational purposes-often, to the detriment of their learning (see, e.g., Malamud & Pop-Eleches, 2011). In fact, free netbook initiatives have not only consistently failed to improve academic achievement in math or language (e.g., Cristia et al., 2017), but they have had no impact on learners' general computer skills (e.g., Beuermann et al., 2015). Some of these initiatives have had small impacts on cognitive skills, but the mechanisms through which those effects occurred remains unclear.

To our knowledge, the only successful deployment of a free laptop initiative was one in which a team of researchers equipped the computers with remedial software. Mo et al. (2013) evaluated a version of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program for grade 3 students in migrant schools in Beijing, China in which the laptops were loaded with a remedial software mapped onto the national curriculum for math (similar to the software products that we discuss under "practice exercises" below). After nine months, the program improved math achievement by 0.17 SDs and computer skills by 0.33 SDs. If a school system decides to invest in free laptops, this study suggests that the quality of the software on the laptops is crucial.

To date, however, the evidence suggests that children do not learn more from interacting with laptops than they do from textbooks. For example, Bando, Gallego, Gertler, and Romero (2016) compared the effect of free laptop and textbook provision in 271 elementary schools in disadvantaged areas of Honduras. After seven months, students in grades 3 and 6 who had received the laptops performed on par with those who had received the textbooks in math and language. Further, even if textbooks essentially become obsolete at the end of each school year, whereas laptops can be reloaded with new materials for each year, the costs of laptop provision (not just the hardware, but also the technical assistance, Internet, and training associated with it) are not yet low enough to make them a more cost-effective way of delivering content to learners.

Evidence on the provision of tablets equipped with software is encouraging but limited. For example, de Hoop et al. (2020) evaluated a composite intervention for first grade students in Zambia's Eastern Province that combined infrastructure (electricity via solar power), hardware (projectors and tablets), and educational materials (lesson plans for educators and interactive lessons for learners, both loaded onto the tablets and mapped onto the official Zambian curriculum). After 14 months, the intervention had improved student early-grade reading by 0.4 SDs, oral vocabulary scores by 0.25 SDs, and early-grade math by 0.22 SDs. It also improved students' achievement by 0.16 on a locally developed assessment. The multifaceted nature of the program, however, makes it challenging to identify the components that are driving the positive effects. Pitchford (2015) evaluated an intervention that provided tablets equipped with educational "apps," to be used for 30 minutes per day for two months to develop early math skills among students in grades 1 through 3 in Lilongwe, Malawi. The evaluation found positive impacts in math achievement, but the main study limitation is that it was conducted in a single school.

Facilitating differentiated instruction

Another way in which technology may improve educational outcomes is by facilitating the delivery of differentiated or individualized instruction. Most developing countries massively expanded access to schooling in recent decades by building new schools and making education more affordable, both by defraying direct costs, as well as compensating for opportunity costs (Duflo, 2001; World Bank, 2018). These initiatives have not only rapidly increased the number of learners enrolled in school, but have also increased the variability in learner' preparation for schooling. Consequently, a large number of learners perform well below grade-based curricular expectations (see, e.g., Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2011; Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). These learners are unlikely to get much from "one-size-fits-all" instruction, in which a single educator delivers instruction deemed appropriate for the middle (or top) of the achievement distribution (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011). Technology could potentially help these learners by providing them with: (a) instruction and opportunities for practice that adjust to the level and pace of preparation of each individual (known as "computer-adaptive learning" (CAL)); or (b) live, one-on-one tutoring.

Computer-adaptive learning

One of the main comparative advantages of technology is its ability to diagnose students' initial learning levels and assign students to instruction and exercises of appropriate difficulty. No individual educator-no matter how talented-can be expected to provide individualized instruction to all learners in his/her class simultaneously. In this respect, technology is uniquely positioned to complement traditional teaching. This use of technology could help learners master basic skills and help them get more out of schooling.

Although many software products evaluated in recent years have been categorized as CAL, many rely on a relatively coarse level of differentiation at an initial stage (e.g., a diagnostic test) without further differentiation. We discuss these initiatives under the category of "increasing opportunities for practice" below. CAL initiatives complement an initial diagnostic with dynamic adaptation (i.e., at each response or set of responses from learners) to adjust both the initial level of difficulty and rate at which it increases or decreases, depending on whether learners' responses are correct or incorrect.

Existing evidence on this specific type of programs is highly promising. Most famously, Banerjee et al. (2007) evaluated CAL software in Vadodara, in the Indian state of Gujarat, in which grade 4 students were offered two hours of shared computer time per week before and after school, during which they played games that involved solving math problems. The level of difficulty of such problems adjusted based on students' answers. This program improved math achievement by 0.35 and 0.47 SDs after one and two years of implementation, respectively. Consistent with the promise of personalized learning, the software improved achievement for all students. In fact, one year after the end of the program, students assigned to the program still performed 0.1 SDs better than those assigned to a business as usual condition. More recently, Muralidharan, et al. (2019) evaluated a "blended learning" initiative in which students in grades 4 through 9 in Delhi, India received 45 minutes of interaction with CAL software for math and language, and 45 minutes of small group instruction before or after going to school. After only 4.5 months, the program improved achievement by 0.37 SDs in math and 0.23 SDs in Hindi. While all learners benefited from the program in absolute terms, the lowest performing learners benefited the most in relative terms, since they were learning very little in school.

We see two important limitations from this body of research. First, to our knowledge, none of these initiatives has been evaluated when implemented during the school day. Therefore, it is not possible to distinguish the effect of the adaptive software from that of additional instructional time. Second, given that most of these programs were facilitated by local instructors, attempts to distinguish the effect of the software from that of the instructors has been mostly based on noncausal evidence. A frontier challenge in this body of research is to understand whether CAL software can increase the effectiveness of school-based instruction by substituting part of the regularly scheduled time for math and language instruction.

Recent improvements in the speed and quality of videoconferencing, as well as in the connectivity of remote areas, have enabled yet another way in which technology can help personalization: live (i.e., real-time) one-on-one tutoring. While the evidence on in-person tutoring is scarce in developing countries, existing studies suggest that this approach works best when it is used to personalize instruction (see, e.g., Banerjee et al., 2007; Banerji, Berry, & Shotland, 2015; Cabezas, Cuesta, & Gallego, 2011).

There are almost no studies on the impact of online tutoring-possibly, due to the lack of hardware and Internet connectivity in low- and middle-income countries. One exception is Chemin and Oledan (2020)'s recent evaluation of an online tutoring program for grade 6 students in Kianyaga, Kenya to learn English from volunteers from a Canadian university via Skype ( videoconferencing software) for one hour per week after school. After 10 months, program beneficiaries performed 0.22 SDs better in a test of oral comprehension, improved their comfort using technology for learning, and became more willing to engage in cross-cultural communication. Importantly, while the tutoring sessions used the official English textbooks and sought in part to help learners with their homework, tutors were trained on several strategies to teach to each learner's individual level of preparation, focusing on basic skills if necessary. To our knowledge, similar initiatives within a country have not yet been rigorously evaluated.

Expanding opportunities for practice

A third way in which technology may improve the quality of education is by providing learners with additional opportunities for practice. In many developing countries, lesson time is primarily devoted to lectures, in which the educator explains the topic and the learners passively copy explanations from the blackboard. This setup leaves little time for in-class practice. Consequently, learners who did not understand the explanation of the material during lecture struggle when they have to solve homework assignments on their own. Technology could potentially address this problem by allowing learners to review topics at their own pace.

Technology can help learners get more out of traditional instruction by providing them with opportunities to implement what they learn in class. This approach could, in theory, allow some learners to anchor their understanding of the material through trial and error (i.e., by realizing what they may not have understood correctly during lecture and by getting better acquainted with special cases not covered in-depth in class).

Existing evidence on practice exercises reflects both the promise and the limitations of this use of technology in developing countries. For example, Lai et al. (2013) evaluated a program in Shaanxi, China where students in grades 3 and 5 were required to attend two 40-minute remedial sessions per week in which they first watched videos that reviewed the material that had been introduced in their math lessons that week and then played games to practice the skills introduced in the video. After four months, the intervention improved math achievement by 0.12 SDs. Many other evaluations of comparable interventions have found similar small-to-moderate results (see, e.g., Lai, Luo, Zhang, Huang, & Rozelle, 2015; Lai et al., 2012; Mo et al., 2015; Pitchford, 2015). These effects, however, have been consistently smaller than those of initiatives that adjust the difficulty of the material based on students' performance (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2007; Muralidharan, et al., 2019). We hypothesize that these programs do little for learners who perform several grade levels behind curricular expectations, and who would benefit more from a review of foundational concepts from earlier grades.

We see two important limitations from this research. First, most initiatives that have been evaluated thus far combine instructional videos with practice exercises, so it is hard to know whether their effects are driven by the former or the latter. In fact, the program in China described above allowed learners to ask their peers whenever they did not understand a difficult concept, so it potentially also captured the effect of peer-to-peer collaboration. To our knowledge, no studies have addressed this gap in the evidence.

Second, most of these programs are implemented before or after school, so we cannot distinguish the effect of additional instructional time from that of the actual opportunity for practice. The importance of this question was first highlighted by Linden (2008), who compared two delivery mechanisms for game-based remedial math software for students in grades 2 and 3 in a network of schools run by a nonprofit organization in Gujarat, India: one in which students interacted with the software during the school day and another one in which students interacted with the software before or after school (in both cases, for three hours per day). After a year, the first version of the program had negatively impacted students' math achievement by 0.57 SDs and the second one had a null effect. This study suggested that computer-assisted learning is a poor substitute for regular instruction when it is of high quality, as was the case in this well-functioning private network of schools.

In recent years, several studies have sought to remedy this shortcoming. Mo et al. (2014) were among the first to evaluate practice exercises delivered during the school day. They evaluated an initiative in Shaanxi, China in which students in grades 3 and 5 were required to interact with the software similar to the one in Lai et al. (2013) for two 40-minute sessions per week. The main limitation of this study, however, is that the program was delivered during regularly scheduled computer lessons, so it could not determine the impact of substituting regular math instruction. Similarly, Mo et al. (2020) evaluated a self-paced and a teacher-directed version of a similar program for English for grade 5 students in Qinghai, China. Yet, the key shortcoming of this study is that the teacher-directed version added several components that may also influence achievement, such as increased opportunities for teachers to provide students with personalized assistance when they struggled with the material. Ma, Fairlie, Loyalka, and Rozelle (2020) compared the effectiveness of additional time-delivered remedial instruction for students in grades 4 to 6 in Shaanxi, China through either computer-assisted software or using workbooks. This study indicates whether additional instructional time is more effective when using technology, but it does not address the question of whether school systems may improve the productivity of instructional time during the school day by substituting educator-led with computer-assisted instruction.

Increasing learner engagement

Another way in which technology may improve education is by increasing learners' engagement with the material. In many school systems, regular "chalk and talk" instruction prioritizes time for educators' exposition over opportunities for learners to ask clarifying questions and/or contribute to class discussions. This, combined with the fact that many developing-country classrooms include a very large number of learners (see, e.g., Angrist & Lavy, 1999; Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2015), may partially explain why the majority of those students are several grade levels behind curricular expectations (e.g., Muralidharan, et al., 2019; Muralidharan & Zieleniak, 2014; Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). Technology could potentially address these challenges by: (a) using video tutorials for self-paced learning and (b) presenting exercises as games and/or gamifying practice.

Technology can potentially increase learner effort and understanding of the material by finding new and more engaging ways to deliver it. Video tutorials designed for self-paced learning-as opposed to videos for whole class instruction, which we discuss under the category of "prerecorded lessons" above-can increase learner effort in multiple ways, including: allowing learners to focus on topics with which they need more help, letting them correct errors and misconceptions on their own, and making the material appealing through visual aids. They can increase understanding by breaking the material into smaller units and tackling common misconceptions.

In spite of the popularity of instructional videos, there is relatively little evidence on their effectiveness. Yet, two recent evaluations of different versions of the Khan Academy portal, which mainly relies on instructional videos, offer some insight into their impact. First, Ferman, Finamor, and Lima (2019) evaluated an initiative in 157 public primary and middle schools in five cities in Brazil in which the teachers of students in grades 5 and 9 were taken to the computer lab to learn math from the platform for 50 minutes per week. The authors found that, while the intervention slightly improved learners' attitudes toward math, these changes did not translate into better performance in this subject. The authors hypothesized that this could be due to the reduction of teacher-led math instruction.

More recently, Büchel, Jakob, Kühnhanss, Steffen, and Brunetti (2020) evaluated an after-school, offline delivery of the Khan Academy portal in grades 3 through 6 in 302 primary schools in Morazán, El Salvador. Students in this study received 90 minutes per week of additional math instruction (effectively nearly doubling total math instruction per week) through teacher-led regular lessons, teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons, or similar lessons assisted by technical supervisors with no content expertise. (Importantly, the first group provided differentiated instruction, which is not the norm in Salvadorian schools). All three groups outperformed both schools without any additional lessons and classrooms without additional lessons in the same schools as the program. The teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons performed 0.24 SDs better, the supervisor-led lessons 0.22 SDs better, and the teacher-led regular lessons 0.15 SDs better, but the authors could not determine whether the effects across versions were different.

Together, these studies suggest that instructional videos work best when provided as a complement to, rather than as a substitute for, regular instruction. Yet, the main limitation of these studies is the multifaceted nature of the Khan Academy portal, which also includes other components found to positively improve learner achievement, such as differentiated instruction by students' learning levels. While the software does not provide the type of personalization discussed above, learners are asked to take a placement test and, based on their score, educators assign them different work. Therefore, it is not clear from these studies whether the effects from Khan Academy are driven by its instructional videos or to the software's ability to provide differentiated activities when combined with placement tests.

Technology can also increase learner engagement by presenting exercises as games and/or by encouraging learner to play and compete with others (e.g., using leaderboards and rewards)-an approach known as "gamification." Both approaches can increase learner motivation and effort by presenting learners with entertaining opportunities for practice and by leveraging peers as commitment devices.

There are very few studies on the effects of games and gamification in low- and middle-income countries. Recently, Araya, Arias Ortiz, Bottan, and Cristia (2019) evaluated an initiative in which grade 4 students in Santiago, Chile were required to participate in two 90-minute sessions per week during the school day with instructional math software featuring individual and group competitions (e.g., tracking each learner's standing in his/her class and tournaments between sections). After nine months, the program led to improvements of 0.27 SDs in the national student assessment in math (it had no spillover effects on reading). However, it had mixed effects on non-academic outcomes. Specifically, the program increased learners' willingness to use computers to learn math, but, at the same time, increased their anxiety toward math and negatively impacted learners' willingness to collaborate with peers. Finally, given that one of the weekly sessions replaced regular math instruction and the other one represented additional math instructional time, it is not clear whether the academic effects of the program are driven by the software or the additional time devoted to learning math.

How can school systems adopt interventions that match their needs?

Here are five specific and sequential guidelines for decisionmakers to realize the potential of education technology to accelerate student learning.

1. Take stock of how your current schools, educators, and learners are engaging with technology.

Carry out a short in-school survey to understand the current practices and potential barriers to adoption of technology (we have included suggested survey instruments in the Appendices); use this information in your decisionmaking process. For example, we learned from conversations with current and former ministers of education from various developing regions that a common limitation to technology use is regulations that hold school leaders accountable for damages to or losses of devices. Another common barrier is lack of access to electricity and Internet, or even the availability of sufficient outlets for charging devices in classrooms. Understanding basic infrastructure and regulatory limitations to the use of education technology is a first necessary step. But addressing these limitations will not guarantee that introducing or expanding technology use will accelerate learning. The next steps are thus necessary.

"In Africa, the biggest limit is connectivity. Fiber is expensive, and we don't have it everywhere. The continent is creating a digital divide between cities, where there is fiber, and the rural areas.

The [Ghanaian] administration put in schools offline/online technologies with books, assessment tools, and open source materials. In deploying this, we are finding that again, teachers are unfamiliar with it. And existing policies prohibit students to bring their own tablets or cell phones. The easiest way to do it would have been to let everyone bring their own device. But policies are against it."
H.E. Matthew Prempeh, Minister of Education of Ghana, on the need to understand the local context.

2. Consider how the introduction of technology may affect the interactions among learners, educators, and content.

Our review of the evidence indicates that technology may accelerate student learning when it is used to scale up access to quality content, facilitate differentiated instruction, increase opportunities for practice, or when it increases learner engagement. For example, will adding electronic whiteboards to classrooms facilitate access to more quality content or differentiated instruction? Or will these expensive boards be used in the same way as the old chalkboards? Will providing one device (laptop or tablet) to each learner facilitate access to more and better content, or offer students more opportunities to practice and learn? Solely introducing technology in classrooms without additional changes is unlikely to lead to improved learning and may be quite costly. If you cannot clearly identify how the interactions among the three key components of the instructional core (educators, learners, and content) may change after the introduction of technology, then it is probably not a good idea to make the investment. See Appendix A for guidance on the types of questions to ask.

3. Once decisionmakers have a clear idea of how education technology can help accelerate student learning in a specific context, it is important to define clear objectives and goals and establish ways to regularly assess progress and make course corrections in a timely manner.

For instance, is the education technology expected to ensure that learners in early grades excel in foundational skills-basic literacy and numeracy-by age 10? If so, will the technology provide quality reading and math materials, ample opportunities to practice, and engaging materials such as videos or games? Will educators be empowered to use these materials in new ways? And how will progress be measured and adjusted?
4. How this kind of reform is approached can matter immensely for its success.
It is easy to nod to issues of "implementation," but that needs to be more than rhetorical. Keep in mind that good use of education technology requires thinking about how it will affect learners, educators, and parents. After all, giving learners digital devices will make no difference if they get broken, are stolen, or go unused. Classroom technologies only matter if educators feel comfortable putting them to work. Since good technology is generally about complementing or amplifying what educators and learners already do, it is almost always a mistake to mandate programs from on high. It is vital that technology be adopted with the input of educators and families and with attention to how it will be used. If technology goes unused or if educators use it ineffectually, the results will disappoint-no matter the virtuosity of the technology. Indeed, unused education technology can be an unnecessary expenditure for cash-strapped education systems. This is why surveying context, listening to voices in the field, examining how technology is used, and planning for course correction is essential.

5. It is essential to communicate with a range of stakeholders, including educators, school leaders, parents, and learners.

Technology can feel alien in schools, confuse parents and (especially) older educators, or become an alluring distraction. Good communication can help address all of these risks. Taking care to listen to educators and families can help ensure that programs are informed by their needs and concerns. At the same time, deliberately and consistently explaining what technology is and is not supposed to do, how it can be most effectively used, and the ways in which it can make it more likely that programs work as intended. For instance, if teachers fear that technology is intended to reduce the need for educators, they will tend to be hostile; if they believe that it is intended to assist them in their work, they will be more receptive. Absent effective communication, it is easy for programs to "fail" not because of the technology but because of how it was used. In short, past experience in rolling out education programs indicates that it is as important to have a strong intervention design as it is to have a solid plan to socialize it among stakeholders.

About the Authors

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Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all? | Brookings

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This research is intended as an evidence-based tool for ministries of education to adopt and more successfully invest in education technology.

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https://www.teachthought.com/technology/using-technology-can/

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15 Questions To Ask About Tech Integration In Your Classroom
* this blog was originally published at TeachThought PD

by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD
For professional development around integrating technology in your school visit our technology integration workshops page.
As I watched Christmas, and the corresponding break from school for my daughters, come and go I was reminded of the fun that technology toys can provide. I was gifted the new Google Home device and it's quite entertaining for my daughters to ask it to make funny sounds, play silly games, set timers, and even ask it for help on their homework. For me it's a great way to start my day asking it to tell me the news or play music throughout the house.

The flip-side of that techno-circus is the trap of finding yourselves engaging with screens and those tech-toys for hours on end and missing out on more analog-like experiences. Just like at home, there are so many great reasons for integrating technology into our schools and classrooms but we're wise to keep our focus by asking whether we're just playing with the edtech toys in our classrooms or truly using those edtech tools to leverage and grow student thinking and learning.
When Should You Integrate Technology?
Perhaps the best answer to this question might be, whenever it helps. That might seem ridiculously simplistic but consider the alternative...when it doesn't help. The complexity of integrating technology begs us to identify the positives and negatives, weigh those, and be sure we're focused on what's best for students. With that in mind, here are 15 questions to help you think about your technology integration. This is by no means exhaustive, in fact I'd love to hear questions you think would be important to add to this list.
1. Will this help all students think and learn more deeply?
Not only should the technology tool you're considering help student think and learn more deeply but does it also help you differentiate instruction to help each and every student access that thinking and learning, not just some? How might your use of technology leverage the 6 Elements of DI?
2. Will this tech lead to non-productive struggle and frustration?
If the technology is glitchy and problematic or just too difficult for the students and you to navigate you run the risk of running into a dead-end. We want students to struggle productively and frustration can be ok if the work interests them but we don't want to lose them because the tool keeps halting their progress.
3. Will my students find this tech boring after the initial exposure?
Beware that myth about how great technology is at engaging students. Yes, new technology can indeed grab the attention of all of us but how quickly will that wear off? Any of us with small children can tell you it's not uncommon for kids to unwrap those Christmas gift tech toys only to put them down in favor of a cardboard box. If you're relying on technology as a classroom management tool you may quickly find yourself in trouble.
4. How will this tech empower students to control their own learning?
One of the goals of great learning environments should always be empowerment of students. Does the technology help them ask and pursue their beautiful questions or is it limiting students? Turning a worksheet into a Google Doc isn't empowering students unless the goal is to help them become more facile with Google Docs and even so aren't there better ways to do that?
5. Am I more enamored with this tech "toy" than my student's learning?
Few things raise questions in my head more quickly than seeing a teacher who can't wait to show me their latest tech gadget. Don't get me wrong, I find them fascinating and love the passion but just because a tool has captured your imagination doesn't mean it necessarily has a place in your classroom or school. It might indeed be a great way to grow learning but starting your lesson planning by thinking, "how can I integrate this neat new tech toy" more often leads you down a stray path.
6. How long will this tech be relevant and supported?
The speed at which technology evolves is staggering and while it's not likely that your devices or tools will be outdated in a lesson or even a school year there are instances where resources go away unexpectedly. More likely is not having the tech support in the event of problems or needed updates either internally or externally. To add to that, some districts block web traffic that you might have counted on. Better to be sure before starting than having to devise a workaround.
7. Does this tech prevent great "analog" thinking and learning?
There are times when the technology actually gets in the way of great communication, collaboration, and creativity. For example, we love the question-storming process of the Question Formulation Technique. While this can certainly be done digitally using Google Docs or something similar it would be hard to reproduce the synergy that occurs when a group is huddled around a large chart paper or whiteboard with markers building questions from the questions and thinking of others. Even in the most technology equipped settings it's often better to go analog.
8. Have I started with purpose and pedagogy instead of the tech?
This is related to #5 above but not exactly the same. Sometimes teachers are directed to use a certain tech tool more often, or perhaps they've just learned about it in a recent faculty meeting or workshop. In this scenario we often find teachers trying to figure out a way to use that tool without first considering their purpose and it usually feels like trying to fit a circle into a square. What do we want students to think about and learn and what tools can better help us do that? As TeachThought PD facilitator Allan Carrington shows us with the Padagogy Wheel, It's Not About The Apps, It's About The Pedagogy.
9. Will all students be able to access and leverage this tech?
Do you have any students whose struggles to use certain technology tools might hinder their learning? That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't use that particular tool but are there similar tools that might be more accessible? Or are there workarounds or supports you might consider to help them access the learning process? How might you make accommodations that don't leave students behind?
10. How does this tech align with my school & class mission & vision?
Admittedly most school Mission and Vision statements are enigmatic and ambiguous but they shouldn't be. Have you clarified a mission/purpose and vision for your classes? This can be a great way to stay on point and any lessons, units, including the use of technology should be aligned to help bring that mission/vision to life.
11. What level(s) of Bloom's Taxonomy does this help students access?
The simplicity of Bloom's Taxonomy can be helpful when thinking through lesson planning. Is your tech tool going to be solely focused on information gathering or will it be used to help students create? While there are times when using technology for lower-level Bloom's tasks is appropriate we're missing wonderful opportunities if we remain stuck there.
12. Is this the best tech to prepare students for the modern world?
21st Century Skills, NextGen Skills, call them what you like but we have to be focused on preparing students for the modern world. Whenever possible we want to get students engaged with technology that is closer to the cutting edge. Perhaps more importantly we want to be sure we're facilitating in ways that push students to cognitively travel the landscape of the modern world.
13. Will parents think this tech threatens their child's security?
Perceptions can become reality and as a parent I'm leery of the threats that can gain access to my children via technology. Be sure that your use of technology is indeed safe for your students but it's smart to get out ahead of the messaging with parents. I appreciate when the teachers of my daughters communicate well ahead of time and if there's a tech tool that might cause apprehension from parents giving them a chance to investigate in advance can be very helpful. This is not a case where the saying "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" holds true.
14. How might I combine this tech with other tools to grow learning?
Sometimes we get so focused on new technology that we don't consider how we might creatively combine it with other tools (digital and analog) to better grow learning. This often becomes more evident after we use that technology a time or two. Google the tool or ask on Twitter or other social media and you might benefit from others who have more experience with that technology and have some great uses you haven't considered.
15. What will you do when this tech doesn't work?
To use another famous quote, "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Be prepared for the inevitability of tech glitches because we all know it's going to happen. Do you know the technology well enough to navigate through the glitches? Will you be able to continue with the learning you'd planned without the technology? Are there alternate activities and work your students can do, perhaps other parts of a project if you're engaged in Project-Based Learning, and then return to the planned work later? Don't be left scrambling with a class in disarray because the wifi went down or the web site you'd planned to use is offline.
Your guiding questions?
The ever-changing terrain of integrating technology presents opportunities and challenges that can feel daunting but continually asking yourself important questions like these can be your best guide. What other questions would you add to this list?
image attribution: Laurie Sullivan Are You Using Technology Because You Can Or Because You Should?; 15 Questions To Ask About Tech Integration In Your Classroom

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15 Questions To Ask About Tech Integration In Your Classroom -

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15 Questions To Ask About Tech Integration In Your Classroom *this blog was originally published at TeachThought PD by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD For professional development around integrating technology in your school visit our technology integration workshops page. As I watched Christmas, and the corresponding break from school for my daughters, come and go ...

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https://www.edutopia.org/technology-integration-guide-description

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What Is Successful Technology Integration?

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Well-integrated use of technology resources by thoroughly trained teachers makes twenty-first-century learning possible. From our Technology Integration Professional Development Guide.

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https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/tech_schools/chapter7.asp

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327238478_Making_Educational_Organizations_Able_to_Change_A_Literature_Review

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https://tech.ed.gov/files/2017/01/NETP17.pdf