The last mile: ensuring meaningful technology integration in schools and classrooms

• In Event: Context matters: Experiences from education technology research in three countries

Proposal

Many global educational technology initiatives assess the success of their efforts by pointing to evidence of “technology integration.” Yet, “technology integration” as a measure of success is often problematic for a number of reasons. First, despite the abundance of research on technology for teaching and learning, both the definition and instantiation of “technology integration” often remain undefined and subjective. This definitional variability makes capturing and measuring integration difficult at best.

Second, much of the research around technology integration focuses on assumptions or unproven causation—for example, the notion that sufficient technology (as in the case of one laptop per student environments) necessarily results in integration (Burns, 2019). Finally, as the Omidyar Network reports (2019), effective technology integration is indeed contingent upon enabling infrastructure, effective educational policies and human capacity. However, these are foundational and minimal—not exhaustive— enabling conditions. At the “last mile” of educational technology provision—schools and classrooms—such enabling conditions are often insufficient or not fully operationalized enough to ensure effective technology integration.

This presentation focuses on technology integration, how it is defined and operationalized, and the challenges of “last mile” integration—that is, ensuring that school and classroom use of technology promotes greater cognitive and social engagement, resulting in improved student learning outcomes.

In addition to these definitional considerations, this panel presentation poses and responds to a series of discrete and inter-related questions that shine a light on technology integration efforts across the globe: Have institutions inadvertently ignored or overlooked technology integration because we have conflated access to and use of sufficient amounts of technology with meaningful integration? What additional enabling conditions must be met so that technology can be used to promote measurably improved teaching and learning in classrooms? How do national regulatory frameworks, required curricula and assessment systems, the organizational culture of the school, and attitudes of the local community, constrain or enable the degree of experimentation or risk-taking that teachers take using technology? Schools are complex structures situated within often proscribed and risk-averse national educational systems—thus, is meaningful technology integration even possible in the absence of systemic changes in the way teaching and learning are viewed, organized and occur within educational systems?

The research presented here will explore these questions in the context of two well-resourced school districts (one in the Global North and one in the Global South), where the presenter spent one year studying how technology was used for teaching and learning. While this research is descriptive, and thus not generalizable, it does adumbrate the many school-level challenges, even in well-resourced contexts, that influence meaningful technology integration.

Author

• Mary Burns, Education Development Center (EDC)