Summary of chapter 3 The Wrong Expectation

  Because of the low academic achievement of American school-aged children in the last three decades, many educators want to find a powerful “hammer” to treat this hard “nail” which could promote students’ academic outcomes prominently.

  “This hammer-seeking scheme rapidly distorted the use of technology in teaching and learning that technology is expected by many to address the seemingly pressing need of improving test scores.” (page 56)

  There is nothing wrong that teachers and administrators wish using technology could boost students’ test scores and promote their academic performance because in such a test-only external environment, high score means that students can be admitted to their ideal school, teachers can get merit pay and administrators can retain school funding and attracted qualified teachers to promote academic outcomes.

  But using technology to improve test scores is wrong. High test score doesn’t mean high cognitive skills that the ability to analyze abstract problems and logical thinking won’t get higher when test score goes up. And nonacademic skills like coping and resilience may be more important than cognitive skills in determining academic performance and employment outcomes. In addition, high test score motivates teaching to the test, it’s not the real purpose of education.

  The real value of educational technology is providing better education, not high test scores. For instance, technology has brought digital textbooks, personal learning networks, collaboration and the iLearn model into teaching and learning for better education.

  Comparing to traditional textbooks, students can download all the lesson materials include text and multimedia content and easily get access to digital textbooks on computers or portable devices with internet connecting anywhere. Teachers can also create their own digital textbooks dedicated for relevant courses by using iBook or other similar software which may better accommodate the needs of their students.

  For developing professional knowledge on teaching by communicating with other teachers towards different topics or interests, teachers can create and maintain a personal or professional learning network based on diverse goals. For example, they can search for others who have similar interests and goals within the database of Twitter and following them to get updates from them. In addition, they can use hashtags to mark interesting information from others’ tweets for later review and tag their own tweets with a topic so that others also find their tweets when searching by hashtags. This interest or goal orientation information gathering technology can help teachers a lot on their own knowledge construction.

  Besides this, technology can also bring collaboration to a new level that collaboration is no longer limited between classmates or friends in physical environment. For instance, students can collaborate with others via online video conferencing tools such like Skype or WeChat and teachers can easily share their lesson plans, learning resources, rubrics and assignments with other teachers in same area via Google Docs which allows users to form a small online sharing group for communication.

  “The most profound change that technology brings to learning is probably the possibility of developing a new learning model, the iLearn model.” (page 66) This iLearn model helps a lot for personalizing students’ needs and individual learning.

  Identifying and assessing students’ instruction levels and providing differentiated instruction according to the assessment are really difficult jobs for teacher to address, but with Google Forms it can be easier. Teachers can design learning activities and provide various materials for students in different instruction levels based on the assessment generated automatically by Google Forms, they won’t worry about making complex assessment for each student anymore.

  For teachers who teach international students from non-English speaking countries, it’s a little difficult for them to promote teaching if they couldn’t understand students’ words clearly. But with Google Translate technology, they can make it easily that they can hear the corresponding translations when students speak their native language.

  In the process of learning, every student performs uniquely in different styles such as visual, kinesthetic or mathematical. Technology can provide more opportunities to meet these styles that teachers can choose different technologies as learning tools for students in different styles to consist on individual learning so that they can authentically take an active role in their learning.

  Using technology to help active students’ learning and motivate their individual development, it’s the real expectation for technology in instruction.