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A new Pew Research survey of more than 2,400 middle school and high school teachers released today shows that, while teachers believe technology has helped with their teaching, it’s also brought new challenges — including the possibility of creating a bigger rift between low-income and high-income students.

A few highlights from the report:

• While 92% of these teachers say the internet has a “major impact” on their ability to access content, resources, and materials for their teaching, 75% say the internet and other digital tools have added new demands to their lives by increasing the range of content and skills about which they must be knowledgeable. And 41% report a “major impact” by requiring more work on their part to be an effective teacher.

• 73% of AP and NWP teachers say that they and/or their students use their mobile phones in the classroom or to complete assignments, and 45% report they or their students use e-readers and 43% use tablet computers in the classroom or to complete assignments.
• Overall, 62% of AP and NWP teachers feel their school does a “good job” supporting teachers’ efforts to bring digital tools into the learning process, and 68% say their school provides formal training in this area. (But that’s the average — there’s a bigger discrepancy when those numbers are broken down between high-income and low-income schools). Still, 85% of these teachers seek out their own opportunities to learn new ways to effectively incorporate these tools into their teaching.
• Despite their heavy tech use, 42% of AP and NWP teachers say their students usually know more than they do when it comes to using new digital technologies.  Just 18% feel they know more than their students.  This is despite the fact that over half of AP and NWP teachers (56%) are “very confident” when it comes to learning how to use the latest digital tools, and another 39% say they are “somewhat confident.”

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

• A large majority of these teachers (84%) agree to some extent with the statement that “Today’s digital technologies are leading to greater disparities between affluent and disadvantaged schools and school districts.” However, asked whether today’s digital technologies are narrowing or widening the gap between the most and least academically successful students, 44% say technology is narrowing the gap and 56% say it is widening the gap.
• These teachers see disparities in access to digital tools having at least some impact on their students. More than half (54%) say all or almost all of their students have sufficient access to digital tools at school, but only a fifth of these teachers (18%) say all or almost all of their students have access to the digital tools they need at home.
• Access to devices is noticeably different between higher and lower and income schools. More than half of teachers — 55% — of higher income students say they or their students use e-readers in the classroom, compared with 41%  teaching in low income areas. And 52% of teachers of upper and upper-middle income students say their students use cell phones to look up information in class, compared with 35% of teachers of the lowest income students.
• Apart from access to devices, knowing how best to use them is also a problem for low-income students. The survey showed that 39% of AP and NWP teachers of low income students say their school is “behind the curve” when it comes to effectively using digital tools in the learning process; just 15% of teachers of higher income students rate their schools poorly in this area.
• And when it comes to blocking sites, 49% of teachers of students living in low income households say their school’s use of internet filters has a major impact on their teaching, compared with 24% of those who teach better off students who say that.
• In the same vein, 33% of teachers of lower income students say their school’s rules about classroom cell phone use by students have a major impact on their teaching, compared with 15% of those who teach students from the highest income households.

Read the full report here.

Here are five, drawn from first-hand observation at major 2012 industry conferences ranging from the more traditional Association of Educational Publishers’ and Association of American Publishers’ Content in Context to the edgy SXSWedu event in Austin. These represent one perspective of what the education industry itself is seeing, cutting across individual conferences and events.

1. PAPER IS NOT DEAD

While digital is firing up imaginations and well-equipped classrooms, paper is still the pervasive medium of choice. Digital instruction is simply finally achieving equal billing for serious consideration and state and federal funding. Despite this year’s declaration from the FCC and U.S. Department of Education that the industry should replace paper with digital textbooks by 2017, financial and technical hurdles remain.

For example, one high-profile Open Educational Resources pilot in Utah uses digital resources to create paper high school science textbooks — at an attractive per-copy price of about five dollars, versus $80 for commercial texts. Why paper? David Wiley of Brigham Young University explained at SXSWedu that the digital device cost per student was high and much of the benefit could be derived in how the material was customized, taking advantage of paper’s “unlimited battery life.”

Technical concerns were front-and-center at a Consortium for School Networking/SIIA Feedback Forum held with district and state officials during the ISTE 2012 conference. While WiFi and devices may exist in a school district, distribution can be lumpy, creating hurdles to smooth implementation. “We have schools that are one hundred percent textbook, and schools that are fully digital — a broad spectrum,” said a Louisiana-based tech coordinator.

It is, one administrator from a California district noted, the last mile Internet connection into schools and even individual classrooms “where things get interesting.” Which renders paper as a cheap, convenient delivery mechanism, a good option — for now.

2. MOOCs AND BLENDED LEARNING FLOURISH

Perhaps the most-covered trend in 2012 is the MOOC movement — Massively Open Online Courses in higher education — so pervasive it is now also getting noticed at K-12-focused events. Investors and media are paying close attention to Coursera, edX, Udacity, and other major players. But the attention paid to the newest MOOCs seemed to overshadow awareness of the progress being made in another online instructional area: K-12 web-only and blended learning.

When it comes to blended learning, one of the biggest challenges this year echoed at ed-tech conferences was agreeing on a clear definition. The Innosight Institute in 2012 simplified its original 40 blended learning profiles to a more manageable number — four models. Perhaps symptomatic of the need for clarity, at one event a representative of a well-known education company claimed it had “invented” blended learning because its reading intervention software existed on computers years ago.

3. MALLS, CHURCHES, BUSES: SCHOOL IS EVERYWHERE 

Online learning aside, the physical definition of “school” and its borders are noticeably expanding, and not just to the home.

At the EdNET 2012 conference, online program manager Gloria L. Keaton of Annapolis Road Academy in Prince George’s County Public Schools, MD, noted that online learning labs don’t have to be in school buildings. “Let’s have a lab in a shopping mall. Kids go there. Teachers go there.”

An administrator from Arizona, speaking at the CoSN/SIIA Feedback Forum, said his district started putting WiFi on buses because kids have an hour-and-a-half ride each way. At that same session, a Chicago-area district official said his schools were working with malls and other public areas to install WiFi for students to use while studying. And a Louisiana tech coordinator said churches, as gathering places, are putting in WiFi to become community centers for studying.

Summed up the CoSN/SIIA facilitator: “The last mile (for school Internet access) is changing. But you’re not responsible for that last mile.”

4. MOBILE AND BYOD: THE CLASH OF REALITY AND POTENTIAL

Discussion of mobile devices — school or student-owned — was a huge topic of conversation in 2012. (Check out ZDNet’s post tracking iPad adoption.)

But as with infrastructure, reality lagged behind enthusiasm. Flybridge Capital’s Matt Witheiler opined at SIIA’s Ed Tech Business Forum that mobile education was “under-invested.” At the CoSN/SIIA Feedback Forum, one Oklahoma district tech said he passed out iPads to all teachers on the first day of school, but “a month later all the teachers were complaining they couldn’t get online when they wanted.”

As to students bringing their own devices? It’s a misconception that BYOD is a common policy, said Peter DeWitt, principal of Poestenkill Elementary School in upstate New York and a popular ed-tech blogger, at EdNET 2012. With pressures of Common Core curriculum, teacher evaluations, new tests and other higher priorities sucking all the time out of the school day, “I don’t think schools are prepared for BYOD. I want them to be,” he said. Issues include teacher control, teaching kids to use their devices on school properly, infrastructure and number of tech support staff.

On the plus side, “The iPad has been one of the elements of seismic change, because of how it opened people’s minds,” said David Straus, vice president of product at Kno at the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit.

5. FLOOD OF MONEY CHASING ED TECH

This year saw so much investor, startup and news media attention paid to ed tech, that by this fall whispers began about the potential of a bubble, one that might drag teachers and students who depend on the latest products down with the overheated companies should it pop.

At year’s end the whispers had become chatter as investors met with the industry at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum in New York City. “There’s more money than talent,” said City Light Capital’s

Josh Cohen, bluntly stating a common attitude. He added that while his firm has invested in higher education, it has “been looking to do a K-12 deal since 2004 and still haven’t found the right one.” Overall, Chief Strategy Officer Diana Rhoten of Amplify observed, “The startup end of the space is extremely over-inflated.”

As for the traditional educational publishers, only Pearson is an active strategic investor among the major players, according to Baran Rosen of Whitestone Communications. Others, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, “have fallen behind” due to internal issues, flagging sales and other distractions. But Rosen noted investors view the appeal of education as huge, “second only to health care” in size.

MISCELLANY

Finally, there’s the trend category of “lots of talk,” nascent widespread adoption. Big or portable education data is not quite there yet, but there’s been lots of promising activity with the Shared Learning Collaborative and the U.S. Department of Education’s MyData initiative. The maker movement is cool, but hardly ubiquitous in most traditional K-12 schools. Digital badges for informal (and some formal) learning trumpeted by Mozilla Open Badges and the MacArthur Foundation are still in early development stages.

There’s just one caveat about trying to divine trends from these half-dozen events. As Justin Serrano, President of Kaplan K12 Learning Services, quipped at the Software and Information Industry Association’s Ed Tech Industry Summit last spring, “Sometimes these conferences are a little bit like a Dead show. You see the same people moving from one to another.”

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes a column for GeekWire. He attended every event listed here, and even spoke at a few of them.

Erin Scott

By now, most would agree that technology has the potential to be a useful tool for learning. Many schools have invested in some form of technology, whether it’s in computer labs, tablets, or a laptop for every student, depending on their budget.

But for many schools, finding a way to integrate the use of tech in a traditional setting — teacher-centered classrooms — is proving to be a challenge. What educational software should be used? What criteria should the software be judged against? And what happens to the role of the teacher and classroom activities when students are using software for practice exercises?

At this point, just a couple of years into the movement, there are no definitive answers yet. Different schools are trying different blended learning models. Most schools allot a designated computer lab time when students use computers for math, literacy, or other type of software. But teachers who are more advanced in using technology and more comfortable with experimenting have students rotate through different learning modalities at different times, including time for online learning, working with the teacher face-to-face, and working on projects in groups fluidly. In the most extreme cases, students spend most of their day on computers, just as they would in the workplace.

But for any of those tactics to work, educators agree that the key is to have a clear vision of what the technology is being used for, and how that will affect the teacher’s role. For schools just beginning to dabble in classroom technology, that’s a daunting idea. Many aren’t willing to upend the existing systems for this new model.

Catlin Tucker, an English teacher in Windsor, Calif., who integrates tech into her students’ school and homework, takes full advantage of what the technology affords her. “Shifting some work online to complement traditional classrooms creates much needed time and space in the classroom,” Tucker said. If technology can replace elements of in-class instruction, classroom time can be leveraged to deepen learning. “[Teachers] can embrace project-based learning and create student-centered classrooms to build on the work that’s completed online.”

That might be easier said than done. While Tucker has come up with a strategy that works for her, it doesn’t always work for others. Liz Arney, Director of Innovative Learning at Aspire Schools, which has a small group instruction model, says students follow the teacher’s pacing guide, which doesn’t always align with what level they’ve progressed to on the software. Kids could be coming into the teacher-taught space at very different points in their online learning. It’s up to the teacher to figure out how to reconcile the two.

What’s more, the quality of the available software isn’t always great. “The programs are just really mediocre,” Arney said. “No one has any business in my mind letting the program tell them what to teach. The programs are just not strong enough.”

The software also promises to provide educators with valuable information on students’ progress day by day, but Arney doesn’t believe the data on student comprehension is reliable.

“It’s a fair question to ask if the technology is good enough or the system is strong enough,” said Brian Greenberg, a Bay Area educator who’s been practicing different ways of using tech in schools.

He’s optimistic that the software will get better, but he’d like to see small-scale experimentation before disseminating ideas to schools everywhere.

CHALLENGES ARE OPPORTUNITIES

One of the biggest challenges of blended learning is also what excites advocates most — allowing kids to progress at their own level and pace. “We will move to a model where we don’t assume all kids are learning the same concept in any given day or week,” Greenberg said. “It’s going to be more about teachers having nimble classrooms.”

But teachers already have a mountain of work and asking them to keep track of where each learner is on the software — which may or may not correlate to core standards — is a tall order. Greenberg says the teacher is crucial to ensuring that blended learning is effective. The technology should free educators to do more of what only they can do — give context to concepts.

Tucker says the teacher needs to have a strong sense of what the technology accomplishes and how her teaching can encourage students to think creatively. “Computer programs alone will not radically change the teaching paradigm,” Tucker said. “Learning does not take place in the act of listening to (or viewing) information explained, but rather in the moments when we are asked to make sense of that information, to wrestle with ideas, to apply, evaluate, synthesize and use what we have learned to create something,” Tucker said.

CASE BY CASE

It’s important that schools show a commitment to the coming change, Arney said — and to have a strong staff and principal.

“The tech is going to kill you the first year. Everything is going to go wrong. You have to have the stomach for that,” she said.

Greenberg’s organization, Silicon Schools Fund, will experiment with blended learning models to find what works for different kinds of school structures and populations. He doesn’t believe anyone has gotten it quite right yet.

“I think the right tone in this world is to be cautiously optimistic. Anyone who says this is easy you should walk away from,” Greenberg said.

“I couldn’t be more stunned by the apathy,” he says in this video, which also documents other schools and educators’ attempts to change the traditional school paradigm.

Watch this short, but important film, created by Education Evolving.

ClassDojo

With the thousands of ed-tech tools available to teachers, it can be difficult to find those that work well and complement teaching strategies. It takes a lot of time to research and integrate, and for teachers in cash-strapped schools, access to some technology is completely out of their reach.

Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don, the co-founders of ClassDojo, had the tech limitations of many public schools in mind when they designed the free service, a behavior management tool meant to reduce the amount of time teachers spend trying to get students’ attention. Classes need just one device — an interactive whiteboard, a computer connected to a projector, or tablet or smartphone.

ClassDojo works on three principles:

• Build positive behaviors through positive reinforcement — basically “catch kids being good” and use specific praise to call out good behavior.
• Real-time feedback is the most effective at improving and changing behavior over a period of time.
• Any tool focused on behavior must engage parents as well.

HOW IT WORKS

Each student gets an avatar and either receives or loses points. The point tallies can be projected on the board for real-time feedback. Teachers and students can come up with mutually agreed upon behavior expectations, and because the categories are framed using positive reinforcement, the tool has the potential to do more than just call out good behavior. For example, a teacher might create a category like “was able to counter another’s point of view without insulting them.” And that behavior becomes part of a classroom norm. ClassDojo can also take attendance and creates pie charts and percentage breakdowns to share with parents.

Teachers’ experience with ClassDojo spans the spectrum. Jennie Dougherty, who taught English at a large urban public high school in Brockton, Massachusetts for three years, recently left to become the technology instructor at a school in East Palo Alto, a low-income Bay Area town. When she first encountered ClassDojo she thought it was just a virtual sticker star chart, a paper version of which she already used. ClassDojo met her basic need — then she discovered it could do more.

“Educators have a specific objective in mind when we select a tool and then we customize,” Dougherty said.

Dougherty also used the tool to get her students to model more mature, college-level behavior. And in higher-level classes she allowed students to award points to one another and found if she prepared them ahead of time, students took this task seriously. And the act of withholding points from one another opened up great discussions for students. For example, she remembers one student refusing to award a peer a point in a debate because the speaker had gotten too emotional. That started a larger discussion about when it’s appropriate to insert oneself into a debate.

But Dougherty was willing to take a risk, and had the support of the administration.

“The classroom is a very high stakes environment,” Doughtery said. “You are getting evaluated. It’s a place where we expect teachers to always be on their A-game.” And that means they may not have time or freedom to try something new. They may even be at risk if they do.

VARYING EXPERIENCES

While Dougherty found ClassDojo useful, some of her colleagues didn’t have the same positive reaction. “What I saw teachers struggle with is how to get the value out of a tool without changing the structure of what they were doing,” said Dougherty. ClassDojo fit her style because she was spending most of her class time on group activities, and less time up front lecturing. It was easy to move around the room awarding points as she checked in on each group’s progress. Teachers who focused on lecturing found it hard to juggle the points system with their usual style of delivering the lesson.

Joan Young, another teacher at a San Francisco Bay Area school, found the service just didn’t fit her class well. She tried the tool, but found that the point system brought out more challenges than benefits. She asked her class what they preferred and they voted for a non-tech strategy she had been using where they could earn “fascination time” at the end of the week by transitioning quickly and quietly between activities. She also felt the tool was too focused on the teacher’s actions. She’d rather see students evaluate their own behavior, learn from mistakes and take ownership of their own learning progress. She felt awarding points stifled that kind of thinking.

Still another teacher at Brockton never got the chance to try ClassDojo because his classroom didn’t have a computer. Brockton is a large public high school south of Boston with more than 4,000 students, and the administration hadn’t been able to get computers into every class. ClassDojo requires a minimal level of technology, just one device. Still, the gap between what many classrooms have at their disposal and what much of the ed-tech world is designing can be unbridgeable.

FUTURE PLANS

The ClassDojo team understands that their tool must work for educators, so they are responsive to suggestions and feedback. They are also far from done with the tool. Sam Chaudhary is excited by what it has been able to do so far, but has big plans for its future. “There’s a whole other half of education that’s almost completely ignored by ed-tech which is beyond building test scores, it’s about building character,” Chaudhary said. He’s thinking about adding a self-evaluation element for students on ClassDojo, to help move it away from teacher-centered instruction. He also wants to strengthen the parental engagement element. He doesn’t feel the current offering of and a percentage breakdown of behavior tells the parent what they really need to know.

Lenny Gonzalez

The promise of technology in the pursuit of learning is vast — and so are the profits. The SIIA valued the ed-tech market at $7.5 billion. With daily launches of new products promising to solve all manner of problems — from managing classrooms to engaging bored students with interactive content to capturing and organizing data, to serving as a one-stop-shop for every necessary service, choosing from the dizzying number of products on the market can be confusing.

But when it comes to the  specific task of helping students, what’s the best app in education? “A web browser,” said Chris Lehmann, Principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, a school that’s embraced technology for years. “Or a Google Doc, or anything that gives you the ability to make a film, or to research, to create, to connect or collaborate,” he said.

Lehmann is famous in progressive education circles for his quote: “Technology must be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” His point: The best technology allows students to explore and create “artifacts of their own learning.”

“The question is, how will technology allow students and teachers to network their learning, to collaborate with each other, to extend the reach of what kids can learn beyond the walls of the school,” he said. “How can technology be used to unlock what hasn’t even been thought of yet?”

These questions are more difficult to answer, and less tangible to measure, than improving test scores, which is what typically draws the attention of educators. But placing too much emphasis on raising test scores will eventually backfire, according to educator, author, and consultant Will Richardson, whose book Why School, was recently released.

“Technology can be an amazing thing for learning, but the way we’re looking at isn’t amazing at all,” Richardson said. “If all we’re doing is valuing test scores, then we’re just using technology to deliver the same traditional curriculum. We have to be thinking about what’s the goal of using technology. What do we want to have happen?”

The premise for using products and software that claim to raise test scores is appealing to lots of educators: leave the “drudgery” part of learning — drill and practices exercises — to software and games, which will then free up teachers’ time to take on more interesting tasks, like applying the knowledge they’ve gained to projects that can lead to deeper learning.

“But my fear is that we’ll never get to that second part,” Richardson said. “As much as we would like to see the opportunity to spend time with kids, and see learning dispositions, we’re not going to value it as much as test scores, because we’re not assessing for it. It’s not showing up in our comparisons, our scores, our grades.”

Richardson, who has embraced the use of technology for learning for many years, says we must ask the question: What’s the goal of using technology? What do we want to have happen? “I’m not inherently against any use of technology, but want us to really think about where it’s going. If it’s about efficiencies of scale, or something more.”

WHERE TO FIND INFORMATION

Currently, schools and educators can look to the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse for some types of information, though it’s been criticized for not being comprehensive or current enough in its coverage of product reviews. In more recent events, just last week, two economists from the Hamilton Project proposed creating a nonprofit called EDU STAR “that would provide the technology and reporting resources for schools looking to quickly and cheaply test education technology products,” according to an EdWeek article.

For thorough online research, there are sites that offer useful reviews of products, such as EdSurge, which is building up a comprehensive repository of up-to-date product information, including things like how the product works, how it’s used, which school districts use it, what platforms it’s available on, price and more. EdShelf, another excellent product information site in Beta, is also a good source, as is ClassroomWindow.

For schools and educators considering tech purchases, there are guiding questions that can help make sense of the ed-tech market, and get to the heart of what matters: reaching students. Hack Education has created an excellent list of questions for ed-tech entrepreneurs to consider when creating products for educators, as well as a list of concepts and ideas that educators should know about technology. And there are countless news outlets and teachers’ blogs that dig into many of these ideas, too.

DEFINING THE CRITERIA

At the ISTE conference in June, where thousands of ed-tech vendors showcased their products, Karen Cator, Department of Education’s Technology Director, talked to educators and helped create the following list of questions to ask when considering tech purchases.

• WHAT DOES IT PROMISE TO DO? Is the main purpose to build students’ knowledge of content, or is it to develop skills and dispositions? Are there meta-cognitive strategies or learning strategies associated with the product?
• WHAT DO YOU EXPECT IT TO DO? Do you expect the product to raise students’ test scores? To grab students’ attention? To flip your classroom? To open up dialogue? To help students’ inquiry process? Be clear about your goals.
• WHAT CRITERIA WAS THE PRODUCT DEVELOPED AGAINST? How was the product conceived and who designed and built the product? What classroom experience does the designer/entrepreneur have? What research was done during the designing process? Was it piloted in schools? Is this a rapid prototype with the flexibility to change and improve?
• HOW WILL IT HELP OR CHANGE TEACHERS’ ROLES? Will the product keep the teacher in the center of the action in class, or will it give more control to students? Does it help the teacher meet the needs of the students, and if so, how? Does it augment teachers’ performance?
• HOW WILL IT CHANGE WHAT HAPPENS IN CLASS? What kind of class environment does it create? Does it encourage collaboration, risk-taking, and student control? If the product is software that allows kids to do practice exercises, how will classroom time be spent on that subject? Will a different kind of curriculum be created, and who will create it? Can hands-on projects be incorporated into class time that build on what students have practiced on computers?

• HOW DO OTHERS RATE THE PRODUCT? Just as you would do with a personal purchase, checking Amazon reviews, Consumer Reports, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter recommendations, asking friends, do your due diligence and research to find out what other educators like and don’t like about the product. For example, some schools have already experimented with certain kinds of software that’s billed as adaptive, or encouraging critical thinking skills, and found that some are much better than others, and have switched. Sharing this knowledge can help educators root through the overwhelming number of choices, and find products that deliver what they promise.
• HOW WILL IT SCALE AND GROW IN THE FUTURE? If the product is going to be used systemically, how sustainable is it? What are the chances that the company will stop providing this service, or start charging or raising fees? What’s the ease of adoption and use? Are there built-in ongoing improvement processes?
• IS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT NEEDED TO USE IT? If so, how much does it cost, and how much time will it take? Too often new technologies are not used to their maximum potential, or are left completely unused. Educators should make sure they have the time and budget allotted to ensure smooth transitions, and that the principal will make professional development a priority.
• IS IT A NATURAL FIT? This question is also quite subjective. The best product should be like electricity, Kator said — there’s no question whether you should or should not use it. There should be an intuitive need that the product fulfills, rather than having teachers tangle themselves into knots trying to find ways to use it.
• IS IT WORTH THE INVESTMENT? This is the most complex question to answer. How much is the cost compared to the amount of time and effort it takes to train staff to use it and to implement it system-wide? Based on what other educators have said, is it worth the time and effort?

What other questions are important to ask?