SPECIAL SECTION: TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM
more than 2,000 superintendents across the country who pledged to
integrate digital learning into their districts’ curricula. The National
Education Technology Plan also includes a focus on providing each
student with the chance to engage in educational experiences led by
technology.
In addition, Education Week states that digital instructional content
is the second largest spend in the K-12 educational technology market,
just behind hardware. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson,
previously known for their paperback publishing, are pushing out the
most digital lessons in math, English/language arts, science, business,
and fine arts.
Students
No student is the same. Each has a different family life, upbringing,
ability to communicate and learn, and yet these students are all being
taught the same way. Schools across the country are shifting from
a one-size-fits-all approach to a personalized learning approach. A
current buzzword in education, personalized learning allows students
to become part of their learning experience. Students will be in control
of creating content for learning using smartphone apps. This approach
intends to put students at the forefront of molding their learning
experience, resulting in stronger student engagement and therefore
better outcomes. The Nellie Mae Education Foundation notes that a
student-centered approach can “only be successful if [it occurs] within
a cultural context that demands continuous improvement and engages
collective processes that foster understanding and broad ownership
of decisions. This should be driven by vigilant consideration of
assessment results that help illuminate the extent to which particular
interventions are working, and who is benefiting from the changes in
what ways.”
THE HOW
Mobile and Digital Learning
Digital learning made a slow entrance into mainstream education,
but with the use of tablets and mobile devices, the number of teachers
using game-based learning in the classroom has doubled in the past six
years. “The explosion in teacher interest and usage of videos and gamebased learning could be a harbinger of a new awakening for digital
learning,” Julie Evans, the CEO of Project Tomorrow, says. In a 2015
survey conducted by Project Tomorrow, 48 percent of K-12 teachers
and nearly two-thirds of K-5 teachers reported adopting the use of
games in their weekly lessons. According to Education Week, 23 million
devices were purchased in 2013 and 2014 alone. More recently, tablets
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