How can educational technology better support underserved students? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Vielka Hoy, Founder and Director at Vielka Hoy Consulting, on Quora:
I believe the key to effectively using education technology for underserved communities is to work within the context of their school communities. Too many educational technologies seem to assume that teachers and administrators have no clue what they are doing by attempting to deliver an entire curriculum without any pedagogy. The problem is that without a teacher, regardless of how accessible or in-depth the content is, it isn't actually being taught, and frankly, most of the information is irrelevant. If we get to a point where a student can actually identify what the problem they are having in school is, then throw an entire year's worth of curriculum at them with no direction, how would we expect that to work? How would a student learn to value schooling and take advantage of the time she spends in the room each day, if we are teaching her that it can all be done in an app or a few minutes online?
In my opinion, it also highlights a larger trend we have in education: we can assess that something isn't working, but then look to the wrong solution. It would be like prescribing cough medicine for a broken arm. Except in education, we do it over and over again.
The problem for students is that with all the ed tech out there, underserved communities are not graduating at higher rates, and in most cases, according to a recent study by Johns Hopkins University, their graduation rates are declining.
In addition to my assertion that the problem lies in trying to out-pedagogy with no pedagogy, Molly Zielezinski for EdSurge points to another difference: with underserved communities, we use education technology to remediate; with privileged communities we use it to advance student learning with practice (most likely coming from teachers). She also provides solutions, most notably not to use technology to remediate and allow students to engage with the broader audience the web allows.
In my teaching and business, I use technology quite a bit. My philosophy is that technology has provided many good things, including the ability for students to process information quickly, and to provide feedback or an opinion quickly. A tweet just happens to be the perfect length for a thesis statement, for example, and it is absolutely fascinating to see a student struggle to write one on paper but take mere seconds to put a great one out on Twitter. And Google Docs is the best thing that ever happened to personal statement-writing. Both are examples of using tech as pedagogy tools rather than curricular tools.
Regarding college counseling, there is a lesson there that applies to larger discourses in education--time. Time is the critical component when considering underserved communities because we are likely playing catch up for something missed in previous years. But we can advance students without remediating them. For example, I consider Geometry to be a key course. It sets students up well for Calculus because it is conceptual, rather than merely computational. If I'm looking forward, I need students to understand why the theorems are important as concepts, but they don't have to repeat an entire course to do that. Knowing that the computational pieces will definitely be reviewed in Algebra II, when I am working with clients, I then only focus on what is unique to the course that didn't go well, and what they'll need again. That's it. Then I use technology to shorten the time needed to teach and access that information. More importantly, students learn to focus on course objectives and use the time in the classroom better.
Rather than using educational technologies to attempt to re/teach an entire curriculum, we should use them as teaching tools to make key items more accessible, meet the students where they are by allowing them to process classroom information as quickly as they do on social media, and shorten the time needed to teach critical concepts.
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