speech on educational technology

REALIZING THE PROMISE:

Leading up to the 75th anniversary of the UN General Assembly, this “Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?” publication kicks off the Center for Universal Education’s first playbook in a series to help improve education around the world.

It is intended as an evidence-based tool for ministries of education, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, to adopt and more successfully invest in education technology.

While there is no single education initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere—as school systems differ in learners and educators, as well as in the availability and quality of materials and technologies—an important first step is understanding how technology is used given specific local contexts and needs.

The surveys in this playbook are designed to be adapted to collect this information from educators, learners, and school leaders and guide decisionmakers in expanding the use of technology.  

Introduction

While technology has disrupted most sectors of the economy and changed how we communicate, access information, work, and even play, its impact on schools, teaching, and learning has been much more limited. We believe that this limited impact is primarily due to technology being been used to replace analog tools, without much consideration given to playing to technology’s comparative advantages. These comparative advantages, relative to traditional “chalk-and-talk” classroom instruction, include helping to scale up standardized instruction, facilitate differentiated instruction, expand opportunities for practice, and increase student engagement. When schools use technology to enhance the work of educators and to improve the quality and quantity of educational content, learners will thrive.

Further, COVID-19 has laid bare that, in today’s environment where pandemics and the effects of climate change are likely to occur, schools cannot always provide in-person education—making the case for investing in education technology.

Here we argue for a simple yet surprisingly rare approach to education technology that seeks to:

• Understand the needs, infrastructure, and capacity of a school system—the diagnosis;
• Survey the best available evidence on interventions that match those conditions—the evidence; and
• Closely monitor the results of innovations before they are scaled up—the prognosis.

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The framework.

Our approach builds on a simple yet intuitive theoretical framework created two decades ago by two of the most prominent education researchers in the United States, David K. Cohen and Deborah Loewenberg Ball. They argue that what matters most to improve learning is the interactions among educators and learners around educational materials. We believe that the failed school-improvement efforts in the U.S. that motivated Cohen and Ball’s framework resemble the ed-tech reforms in much of the developing world to date in the lack of clarity improving the interactions between educators, learners, and the educational material. We build on their framework by adding parents as key agents that mediate the relationships between learners and educators and the material (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The instructional core

Adapted from Cohen and Ball (1999)

As the figure above suggests, ed-tech interventions can affect the instructional core in a myriad of ways. Yet, just because technology can do something, it does not mean it should. School systems in developing countries differ along many dimensions and each system is likely to have different needs for ed-tech interventions, as well as different infrastructure and capacity to enact such interventions.

The diagnosis:

How can school systems assess their needs and preparedness.

A useful first step for any school system to determine whether it should invest in education technology is to diagnose its:

• Specific needs to improve student learning (e.g., raising the average level of achievement, remediating gaps among low performers, and challenging high performers to develop higher-order skills);
• Infrastructure to adopt technology-enabled solutions (e.g., electricity connection, availability of space and outlets, stock of computers, and Internet connectivity at school and at learners’ homes); and
• Capacity to integrate technology in the instructional process (e.g., learners’ and educators’ level of familiarity and comfort with hardware and software, their beliefs about the level of usefulness of technology for learning purposes, and their current uses of such technology).

Before engaging in any new data collection exercise, school systems should take full advantage of existing administrative data that could shed light on these three main questions. This could be in the form of internal evaluations but also international learner assessments, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and/or the Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS). But if school systems lack information on their preparedness for ed-tech reforms or if they seek to complement existing data with a richer set of indicators, we developed a set of surveys for learners, educators, and school leaders. Download the full report to see how we map out the main aspects covered by these surveys, in hopes of highlighting how they could be used to inform decisions around the adoption of ed-tech interventions.

The evidence:

How can school systems identify promising ed-tech interventions.

There is no single “ed-tech” initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere, simply because school systems differ in learners and educators, as well as in the availability and quality of materials and technologies. Instead, to realize the potential of education technology to accelerate student learning, decisionmakers should focus on four potential uses of technology that play to its comparative advantages and complement the work of educators to accelerate student learning (Figure 2). These comparative advantages include:

• Scaling up quality instruction, such as through prerecorded quality lessons.
• Facilitating differentiated instruction, through, for example, computer-adaptive learning and live one-on-one tutoring.
• Expanding opportunities to practice.
• Increasing learner engagement through videos and games.

Figure 2: Comparative advantages of technology

Here we review the evidence on ed-tech interventions from 37 studies in 20 countries*, organizing them by comparative advantage. It’s important to note that ours is not the only way to classify these interventions (e.g., video tutorials could be considered as a strategy to scale up instruction or increase learner engagement), but we believe it may be useful to highlight the needs that they could address and why technology is well positioned to do so.

When discussing specific studies, we report the magnitude of the effects of interventions using standard deviations (SDs). SDs are a widely used metric in research to express the effect of a program or policy with respect to a business-as-usual condition (e.g., test scores). There are several ways to make sense of them. One is to categorize the magnitude of the effects based on the results of impact evaluations. In developing countries, effects below 0.1 SDs are considered to be small, effects between 0.1 and 0.2 SDs are medium, and those above 0.2 SDs are large (for reviews that estimate the average effect of groups of interventions, called “meta analyses,” see e.g., Conn, 2017; Kremer, Brannen, & Glennerster, 2013; McEwan, 2014; Snilstveit et al., 2015; Evans & Yuan, 2020.)

*In surveying the evidence, we began by compiling studies from prior general and ed-tech specific evidence reviews that some of us have written and from ed-tech reviews conducted by others. Then, we tracked the studies cited by the ones we had previously read and reviewed those, as well. In identifying studies for inclusion, we focused on experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations of education technology interventions from pre-school to secondary school in low- and middle-income countries that were released between 2000 and 2020. We only included interventions that sought to improve student learning directly (i.e., students’ interaction with the material), as opposed to interventions that have impacted achievement indirectly, by reducing teacher absence or increasing parental engagement. This process yielded 37 studies in 20 countries (see the full list of studies in Appendix B).

Scaling up standardized instruction

One of the ways in which technology may improve the quality of education is through its capacity to deliver standardized quality content at scale. This feature of technology may be particularly useful in three types of settings: (a) those in “hard-to-staff” schools (i.e., schools that struggle to recruit educators with the requisite training and experience—typically, in rural and/or remote areas) (see, e.g., Urquiola & Vegas, 2005); (b) those in which many educators are frequently absent from school (e.g., Chaudhury, Hammer, Kremer, Muralidharan, & Rogers, 2006; Muralidharan, Das, Holla, & Mohpal, 2017); and/or (c) those in which educators have low levels of pedagogical and subject matter expertise (e.g., Bietenbeck, Piopiunik, & Wiederhold, 2018; Bold et al., 2017; Metzler & Woessmann, 2012; Santibañez, 2006) and do not have opportunities to observe and receive feedback (e.g., Bruns, Costa, & Cunha, 2018; Cilliers, Fleisch, Prinsloo, & Taylor, 2018). Technology could address this problem by: (a) disseminating lessons delivered by qualified educators to a large number of learners (e.g., through prerecorded or live lessons); (b) enabling distance education (e.g., for learners in remote areas and/or during periods of school closures); and (c) distributing hardware preloaded with educational materials.

Prerecorded lessons

Technology seems to be well placed to amplify the impact of effective educators by disseminating their lessons. Evidence on the impact of prerecorded lessons is encouraging, but not conclusive. Some initiatives that have used short instructional videos to complement regular instruction, in conjunction with other learning materials, have raised student learning on independent assessments. For example, Beg et al. (2020) evaluated an initiative in Punjab, Pakistan in which grade 8 classrooms received an intervention that included short videos to substitute live instruction, quizzes for learners to practice the material from every lesson, tablets for educators to learn the material and follow the lesson, and LED screens to project the videos onto a classroom screen. After six months, the intervention improved the performance of learners on independent tests of math and science by 0.19 and 0.24 SDs, respectively but had no discernible effect on the math and science section of Punjab’s high-stakes exams.

One study suggests that approaches that are far less technologically sophisticated can also improve learning outcomes—especially, if the business-as-usual instruction is of low quality. For example, Naslund-Hadley, Parker, and Hernandez-Agramonte (2014) evaluated a preschool math program in Cordillera, Paraguay that used audio segments and written materials four days per week for an hour per day during the school day. After five months, the intervention improved math scores by 0.16 SDs, narrowing gaps between low- and high-achieving learners, and between those with and without educators with formal training in early childhood education.

Yet, the integration of prerecorded material into regular instruction has not always been successful. For example, de Barros (2020) evaluated an intervention that combined instructional videos for math and science with infrastructure upgrades (e.g., two “smart” classrooms, two TVs, and two tablets), printed workbooks for students, and in-service training for educators of learners in grades 9 and 10 in Haryana, India (all materials were mapped onto the official curriculum). After 11 months, the intervention negatively impacted math achievement (by 0.08 SDs) and had no effect on science (with respect to business as usual classes). It reduced the share of lesson time that educators devoted to instruction and negatively impacted an index of instructional quality. Likewise, Seo (2017) evaluated several combinations of infrastructure (solar lights and TVs) and prerecorded videos (in English and/or bilingual) for grade 11 students in northern Tanzania and found that none of the variants improved student learning, even when the videos were used. The study reports effects from the infrastructure component across variants, but as others have noted (Muralidharan, Romero, & Wüthrich, 2019), this approach to estimating impact is problematic.

A very similar intervention delivered after school hours, however, had sizeable effects on learners’ basic skills. Chiplunkar, Dhar, and Nagesh (2020) evaluated an initiative in Chennai (the capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu, India) delivered by the same organization as above that combined short videos that explained key concepts in math and science with worksheets, facilitator-led instruction, small groups for peer-to-peer learning, and occasional career counseling and guidance for grade 9 students. These lessons took place after school for one hour, five times a week. After 10 months, it had large effects on learners’ achievement as measured by tests of basic skills in math and reading, but no effect on a standardized high-stakes test in grade 10 or socio-emotional skills (e.g., teamwork, decisionmaking, and communication).

Drawing general lessons from this body of research is challenging for at least two reasons. First, all of the studies above have evaluated the impact of prerecorded lessons combined with several other components (e.g., hardware, print materials, or other activities). Therefore, it is possible that the effects found are due to these additional components, rather than to the recordings themselves, or to the interaction between the two (see Muralidharan, 2017 for a discussion of the challenges of interpreting “bundled” interventions). Second, while these studies evaluate some type of prerecorded lessons, none examines the content of such lessons. Thus, it seems entirely plausible that the direction and magnitude of the effects depends largely on the quality of the recordings (e.g., the expertise of the educator recording it, the amount of preparation that went into planning the recording, and its alignment with best teaching practices).

These studies also raise three important questions worth exploring in future research. One of them is why none of the interventions discussed above had effects on high-stakes exams, even if their materials are typically mapped onto the official curriculum. It is possible that the official curricula are simply too challenging for learners in these settings, who are several grade levels behind expectations and who often need to reinforce basic skills (see Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). Another question is whether these interventions have long-term effects on teaching practices. It seems plausible that, if these interventions are deployed in contexts with low teaching quality, educators may learn something from watching the videos or listening to the recordings with learners. Yet another question is whether these interventions make it easier for schools to deliver instruction to learners whose native language is other than the official medium of instruction.

Distance education

Technology can also allow learners living in remote areas to access education. The evidence on these initiatives is encouraging. For example, Johnston and Ksoll (2017) evaluated a program that broadcasted live instruction via satellite to rural primary school students in the Volta and Greater Accra regions of Ghana. For this purpose, the program also equipped classrooms with the technology needed to connect to a studio in Accra, including solar panels, a satellite modem, a projector, a webcam, microphones, and a computer with interactive software. After two years, the intervention improved the numeracy scores of students in grades 2 through 4, and some foundational literacy tasks, but it had no effect on attendance or classroom time devoted to instruction, as captured by school visits. The authors interpreted these results as suggesting that the gains in achievement may be due to improving the quality of instruction that children received (as opposed to increased instructional time). Naik, Chitre, Bhalla, and Rajan (2019) evaluated a similar program in the Indian state of Karnataka and also found positive effects on learning outcomes, but it is not clear whether those effects are due to the program or due to differences in the groups of students they compared to estimate the impact of the initiative.

In one context (Mexico), this type of distance education had positive long-term effects. Navarro-Sola (2019) took advantage of the staggered rollout of the telesecundarias (i.e., middle schools with lessons broadcasted through satellite TV) in 1968 to estimate its impact. The policy had short-term effects on students’ enrollment in school: For every telesecundaria per 50 children, 10 students enrolled in middle school and two pursued further education. It also had a long-term influence on the educational and employment trajectory of its graduates. Each additional year of education induced by the policy increased average income by nearly 18 percent. This effect was attributable to more graduates entering the labor force and shifting from agriculture and the informal sector. Similarly, Fabregas (2019) leveraged a later expansion of this policy in 1993 and found that each additional telesecundaria per 1,000 adolescents led to an average increase of 0.2 years of education, and a decline in fertility for women, but no conclusive evidence of long-term effects on labor market outcomes.

It is crucial to interpret these results keeping in mind the settings where the interventions were implemented. As we mention above, part of the reason why they have proven effective is that the “counterfactual” conditions for learning (i.e., what would have happened to learners in the absence of such programs) was either to not have access to schooling or to be exposed to low-quality instruction. School systems interested in taking up similar interventions should assess the extent to which their learners (or parts of their learner population) find themselves in similar conditions to the subjects of the studies above. This illustrates the importance of assessing the needs of a system before reviewing the evidence.

Preloaded hardware

Technology also seems well positioned to disseminate educational materials. Specifically, hardware (e.g., desktop computers, laptops, or tablets) could also help deliver educational software (e.g., word processing, reference texts, and/or games). In theory, these materials could not only undergo a quality assurance review (e.g., by curriculum specialists and educators), but also draw on the interactions with learners for adjustments (e.g., identifying areas needing reinforcement) and enable interactions between learners and educators.

In practice, however, most initiatives that have provided learners with free computers, laptops, and netbooks do not leverage any of the opportunities mentioned above. Instead, they install a standard set of educational materials and hope that learners find them helpful enough to take them up on their own. Students rarely do so, and instead use the laptops for recreational purposes—often, to the detriment of their learning (see, e.g., Malamud & Pop-Eleches, 2011). In fact, free netbook initiatives have not only consistently failed to improve academic achievement in math or language (e.g., Cristia et al., 2017), but they have had no impact on learners’ general computer skills (e.g., Beuermann et al., 2015). Some of these initiatives have had small impacts on cognitive skills, but the mechanisms through which those effects occurred remains unclear.

To our knowledge, the only successful deployment of a free laptop initiative was one in which a team of researchers equipped the computers with remedial software. Mo et al. (2013) evaluated a version of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program for grade 3 students in migrant schools in Beijing, China in which the laptops were loaded with a remedial software mapped onto the national curriculum for math (similar to the software products that we discuss under “practice exercises” below). After nine months, the program improved math achievement by 0.17 SDs and computer skills by 0.33 SDs. If a school system decides to invest in free laptops, this study suggests that the quality of the software on the laptops is crucial.

To date, however, the evidence suggests that children do not learn more from interacting with laptops than they do from textbooks. For example, Bando, Gallego, Gertler, and Romero (2016) compared the effect of free laptop and textbook provision in 271 elementary schools in disadvantaged areas of Honduras. After seven months, students in grades 3 and 6 who had received the laptops performed on par with those who had received the textbooks in math and language. Further, even if textbooks essentially become obsolete at the end of each school year, whereas laptops can be reloaded with new materials for each year, the costs of laptop provision (not just the hardware, but also the technical assistance, Internet, and training associated with it) are not yet low enough to make them a more cost-effective way of delivering content to learners.

Evidence on the provision of tablets equipped with software is encouraging but limited. For example, de Hoop et al. (2020) evaluated a composite intervention for first grade students in Zambia’s Eastern Province that combined infrastructure (electricity via solar power), hardware (projectors and tablets), and educational materials (lesson plans for educators and interactive lessons for learners, both loaded onto the tablets and mapped onto the official Zambian curriculum). After 14 months, the intervention had improved student early-grade reading by 0.4 SDs, oral vocabulary scores by 0.25 SDs, and early-grade math by 0.22 SDs. It also improved students’ achievement by 0.16 on a locally developed assessment. The multifaceted nature of the program, however, makes it challenging to identify the components that are driving the positive effects. Pitchford (2015) evaluated an intervention that provided tablets equipped with educational “apps,” to be used for 30 minutes per day for two months to develop early math skills among students in grades 1 through 3 in Lilongwe, Malawi. The evaluation found positive impacts in math achievement, but the main study limitation is that it was conducted in a single school.

Facilitating differentiated instruction

Another way in which technology may improve educational outcomes is by facilitating the delivery of differentiated or individualized instruction. Most developing countries massively expanded access to schooling in recent decades by building new schools and making education more affordable, both by defraying direct costs, as well as compensating for opportunity costs (Duflo, 2001; World Bank, 2018). These initiatives have not only rapidly increased the number of learners enrolled in school, but have also increased the variability in learner’ preparation for schooling. Consequently, a large number of learners perform well below grade-based curricular expectations (see, e.g., Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2011; Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). These learners are unlikely to get much from “one-size-fits-all” instruction, in which a single educator delivers instruction deemed appropriate for the middle (or top) of the achievement distribution (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011). Technology could potentially help these learners by providing them with: (a) instruction and opportunities for practice that adjust to the level and pace of preparation of each individual (known as “computer-adaptive learning” (CAL)); or (b) live, one-on-one tutoring.

Computer-adaptive learning

One of the main comparative advantages of technology is its ability to diagnose students’ initial learning levels and assign students to instruction and exercises of appropriate difficulty. No individual educator—no matter how talented—can be expected to provide individualized instruction to all learners in his/her class simultaneously . In this respect, technology is uniquely positioned to complement traditional teaching. This use of technology could help learners master basic skills and help them get more out of schooling.

Although many software products evaluated in recent years have been categorized as CAL, many rely on a relatively coarse level of differentiation at an initial stage (e.g., a diagnostic test) without further differentiation. We discuss these initiatives under the category of “increasing opportunities for practice” below. CAL initiatives complement an initial diagnostic with dynamic adaptation (i.e., at each response or set of responses from learners) to adjust both the initial level of difficulty and rate at which it increases or decreases, depending on whether learners’ responses are correct or incorrect.

Existing evidence on this specific type of programs is highly promising. Most famously, Banerjee et al. (2007) evaluated CAL software in Vadodara, in the Indian state of Gujarat, in which grade 4 students were offered two hours of shared computer time per week before and after school, during which they played games that involved solving math problems. The level of difficulty of such problems adjusted based on students’ answers. This program improved math achievement by 0.35 and 0.47 SDs after one and two years of implementation, respectively. Consistent with the promise of personalized learning, the software improved achievement for all students. In fact, one year after the end of the program, students assigned to the program still performed 0.1 SDs better than those assigned to a business as usual condition. More recently, Muralidharan, et al. (2019) evaluated a “blended learning” initiative in which students in grades 4 through 9 in Delhi, India received 45 minutes of interaction with CAL software for math and language, and 45 minutes of small group instruction before or after going to school. After only 4.5 months, the program improved achievement by 0.37 SDs in math and 0.23 SDs in Hindi. While all learners benefited from the program in absolute terms, the lowest performing learners benefited the most in relative terms, since they were learning very little in school.

We see two important limitations from this body of research. First, to our knowledge, none of these initiatives has been evaluated when implemented during the school day. Therefore, it is not possible to distinguish the effect of the adaptive software from that of additional instructional time. Second, given that most of these programs were facilitated by local instructors, attempts to distinguish the effect of the software from that of the instructors has been mostly based on noncausal evidence. A frontier challenge in this body of research is to understand whether CAL software can increase the effectiveness of school-based instruction by substituting part of the regularly scheduled time for math and language instruction.

Live one-on-one tutoring

Recent improvements in the speed and quality of videoconferencing, as well as in the connectivity of remote areas, have enabled yet another way in which technology can help personalization: live (i.e., real-time) one-on-one tutoring. While the evidence on in-person tutoring is scarce in developing countries, existing studies suggest that this approach works best when it is used to personalize instruction (see, e.g., Banerjee et al., 2007; Banerji, Berry, & Shotland, 2015; Cabezas, Cuesta, & Gallego, 2011).

There are almost no studies on the impact of online tutoring—possibly, due to the lack of hardware and Internet connectivity in low- and middle-income countries. One exception is Chemin and Oledan (2020)’s recent evaluation of an online tutoring program for grade 6 students in Kianyaga, Kenya to learn English from volunteers from a Canadian university via Skype ( videoconferencing software) for one hour per week after school. After 10 months, program beneficiaries performed 0.22 SDs better in a test of oral comprehension, improved their comfort using technology for learning, and became more willing to engage in cross-cultural communication. Importantly, while the tutoring sessions used the official English textbooks and sought in part to help learners with their homework, tutors were trained on several strategies to teach to each learner’s individual level of preparation, focusing on basic skills if necessary. To our knowledge, similar initiatives within a country have not yet been rigorously evaluated.

Expanding opportunities for practice

A third way in which technology may improve the quality of education is by providing learners with additional opportunities for practice. In many developing countries, lesson time is primarily devoted to lectures, in which the educator explains the topic and the learners passively copy explanations from the blackboard. This setup leaves little time for in-class practice. Consequently, learners who did not understand the explanation of the material during lecture struggle when they have to solve homework assignments on their own. Technology could potentially address this problem by allowing learners to review topics at their own pace.

Practice exercises

Technology can help learners get more out of traditional instruction by providing them with opportunities to implement what they learn in class. This approach could, in theory, allow some learners to anchor their understanding of the material through trial and error (i.e., by realizing what they may not have understood correctly during lecture and by getting better acquainted with special cases not covered in-depth in class).

Existing evidence on practice exercises reflects both the promise and the limitations of this use of technology in developing countries. For example, Lai et al. (2013) evaluated a program in Shaanxi, China where students in grades 3 and 5 were required to attend two 40-minute remedial sessions per week in which they first watched videos that reviewed the material that had been introduced in their math lessons that week and then played games to practice the skills introduced in the video. After four months, the intervention improved math achievement by 0.12 SDs. Many other evaluations of comparable interventions have found similar small-to-moderate results (see, e.g., Lai, Luo, Zhang, Huang, & Rozelle, 2015; Lai et al., 2012; Mo et al., 2015; Pitchford, 2015). These effects, however, have been consistently smaller than those of initiatives that adjust the difficulty of the material based on students’ performance (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2007; Muralidharan, et al., 2019). We hypothesize that these programs do little for learners who perform several grade levels behind curricular expectations, and who would benefit more from a review of foundational concepts from earlier grades.

We see two important limitations from this research. First, most initiatives that have been evaluated thus far combine instructional videos with practice exercises, so it is hard to know whether their effects are driven by the former or the latter. In fact, the program in China described above allowed learners to ask their peers whenever they did not understand a difficult concept, so it potentially also captured the effect of peer-to-peer collaboration. To our knowledge, no studies have addressed this gap in the evidence.

Second, most of these programs are implemented before or after school, so we cannot distinguish the effect of additional instructional time from that of the actual opportunity for practice. The importance of this question was first highlighted by Linden (2008), who compared two delivery mechanisms for game-based remedial math software for students in grades 2 and 3 in a network of schools run by a nonprofit organization in Gujarat, India: one in which students interacted with the software during the school day and another one in which students interacted with the software before or after school (in both cases, for three hours per day). After a year, the first version of the program had negatively impacted students’ math achievement by 0.57 SDs and the second one had a null effect. This study suggested that computer-assisted learning is a poor substitute for regular instruction when it is of high quality, as was the case in this well-functioning private network of schools.

In recent years, several studies have sought to remedy this shortcoming. Mo et al. (2014) were among the first to evaluate practice exercises delivered during the school day. They evaluated an initiative in Shaanxi, China in which students in grades 3 and 5 were required to interact with the software similar to the one in Lai et al. (2013) for two 40-minute sessions per week. The main limitation of this study, however, is that the program was delivered during regularly scheduled computer lessons, so it could not determine the impact of substituting regular math instruction. Similarly, Mo et al. (2020) evaluated a self-paced and a teacher-directed version of a similar program for English for grade 5 students in Qinghai, China. Yet, the key shortcoming of this study is that the teacher-directed version added several components that may also influence achievement, such as increased opportunities for teachers to provide students with personalized assistance when they struggled with the material. Ma, Fairlie, Loyalka, and Rozelle (2020) compared the effectiveness of additional time-delivered remedial instruction for students in grades 4 to 6 in Shaanxi, China through either computer-assisted software or using workbooks. This study indicates whether additional instructional time is more effective when using technology, but it does not address the question of whether school systems may improve the productivity of instructional time during the school day by substituting educator-led with computer-assisted instruction.

Increasing learner engagement

Another way in which technology may improve education is by increasing learners’ engagement with the material. In many school systems, regular “chalk and talk” instruction prioritizes time for educators’ exposition over opportunities for learners to ask clarifying questions and/or contribute to class discussions. This, combined with the fact that many developing-country classrooms include a very large number of learners (see, e.g., Angrist & Lavy, 1999; Duflo, Dupas, & Kremer, 2015), may partially explain why the majority of those students are several grade levels behind curricular expectations (e.g., Muralidharan, et al., 2019; Muralidharan & Zieleniak, 2014; Pritchett & Beatty, 2015). Technology could potentially address these challenges by: (a) using video tutorials for self-paced learning and (b) presenting exercises as games and/or gamifying practice.

Video tutorials

Technology can potentially increase learner effort and understanding of the material by finding new and more engaging ways to deliver it. Video tutorials designed for self-paced learning—as opposed to videos for whole class instruction, which we discuss under the category of “prerecorded lessons” above—can increase learner effort in multiple ways, including: allowing learners to focus on topics with which they need more help, letting them correct errors and misconceptions on their own, and making the material appealing through visual aids. They can increase understanding by breaking the material into smaller units and tackling common misconceptions.

In spite of the popularity of instructional videos, there is relatively little evidence on their effectiveness. Yet, two recent evaluations of different versions of the Khan Academy portal, which mainly relies on instructional videos, offer some insight into their impact. First, Ferman, Finamor, and Lima (2019) evaluated an initiative in 157 public primary and middle schools in five cities in Brazil in which the teachers of students in grades 5 and 9 were taken to the computer lab to learn math from the platform for 50 minutes per week. The authors found that, while the intervention slightly improved learners’ attitudes toward math, these changes did not translate into better performance in this subject. The authors hypothesized that this could be due to the reduction of teacher-led math instruction.

More recently, Büchel, Jakob, Kühnhanss, Steffen, and Brunetti (2020) evaluated an after-school, offline delivery of the Khan Academy portal in grades 3 through 6 in 302 primary schools in Morazán, El Salvador. Students in this study received 90 minutes per week of additional math instruction (effectively nearly doubling total math instruction per week) through teacher-led regular lessons, teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons, or similar lessons assisted by technical supervisors with no content expertise. (Importantly, the first group provided differentiated instruction, which is not the norm in Salvadorian schools). All three groups outperformed both schools without any additional lessons and classrooms without additional lessons in the same schools as the program. The teacher-assisted Khan Academy lessons performed 0.24 SDs better, the supervisor-led lessons 0.22 SDs better, and the teacher-led regular lessons 0.15 SDs better, but the authors could not determine whether the effects across versions were different.

Together, these studies suggest that instructional videos work best when provided as a complement to, rather than as a substitute for, regular instruction. Yet, the main limitation of these studies is the multifaceted nature of the Khan Academy portal, which also includes other components found to positively improve learner achievement, such as differentiated instruction by students’ learning levels. While the software does not provide the type of personalization discussed above, learners are asked to take a placement test and, based on their score, educators assign them different work. Therefore, it is not clear from these studies whether the effects from Khan Academy are driven by its instructional videos or to the software’s ability to provide differentiated activities when combined with placement tests.

Games and gamification

Technology can also increase learner engagement by presenting exercises as games and/or by encouraging learner to play and compete with others (e.g., using leaderboards and rewards)—an approach known as “gamification.” Both approaches can increase learner motivation and effort by presenting learners with entertaining opportunities for practice and by leveraging peers as commitment devices.

There are very few studies on the effects of games and gamification in low- and middle-income countries. Recently, Araya, Arias Ortiz, Bottan, and Cristia (2019) evaluated an initiative in which grade 4 students in Santiago, Chile were required to participate in two 90-minute sessions per week during the school day with instructional math software featuring individual and group competitions (e.g., tracking each learner’s standing in his/her class and tournaments between sections). After nine months, the program led to improvements of 0.27 SDs in the national student assessment in math (it had no spillover effects on reading). However, it had mixed effects on non-academic outcomes. Specifically, the program increased learners’ willingness to use computers to learn math, but, at the same time, increased their anxiety toward math and negatively impacted learners’ willingness to collaborate with peers. Finally, given that one of the weekly sessions replaced regular math instruction and the other one represented additional math instructional time, it is not clear whether the academic effects of the program are driven by the software or the additional time devoted to learning math.

The prognosis:

How can school systems adopt interventions that match their needs.

Here are five specific and sequential guidelines for decisionmakers to realize the potential of education technology to accelerate student learning.

1. Take stock of how your current schools, educators, and learners are engaging with technology .

Carry out a short in-school survey to understand the current practices and potential barriers to adoption of technology (we have included suggested survey instruments in the Appendices); use this information in your decisionmaking process. For example, we learned from conversations with current and former ministers of education from various developing regions that a common limitation to technology use is regulations that hold school leaders accountable for damages to or losses of devices. Another common barrier is lack of access to electricity and Internet, or even the availability of sufficient outlets for charging devices in classrooms. Understanding basic infrastructure and regulatory limitations to the use of education technology is a first necessary step. But addressing these limitations will not guarantee that introducing or expanding technology use will accelerate learning. The next steps are thus necessary.

“In Africa, the biggest limit is connectivity. Fiber is expensive, and we don’t have it everywhere. The continent is creating a digital divide between cities, where there is fiber, and the rural areas.  The [Ghanaian] administration put in schools offline/online technologies with books, assessment tools, and open source materials. In deploying this, we are finding that again, teachers are unfamiliar with it. And existing policies prohibit students to bring their own tablets or cell phones. The easiest way to do it would have been to let everyone bring their own device. But policies are against it.” H.E. Matthew Prempeh, Minister of Education of Ghana, on the need to understand the local context.

2. Consider how the introduction of technology may affect the interactions among learners, educators, and content .

Our review of the evidence indicates that technology may accelerate student learning when it is used to scale up access to quality content, facilitate differentiated instruction, increase opportunities for practice, or when it increases learner engagement. For example, will adding electronic whiteboards to classrooms facilitate access to more quality content or differentiated instruction? Or will these expensive boards be used in the same way as the old chalkboards? Will providing one device (laptop or tablet) to each learner facilitate access to more and better content, or offer students more opportunities to practice and learn? Solely introducing technology in classrooms without additional changes is unlikely to lead to improved learning and may be quite costly. If you cannot clearly identify how the interactions among the three key components of the instructional core (educators, learners, and content) may change after the introduction of technology, then it is probably not a good idea to make the investment. See Appendix A for guidance on the types of questions to ask.

3. Once decisionmakers have a clear idea of how education technology can help accelerate student learning in a specific context, it is important to define clear objectives and goals and establish ways to regularly assess progress and make course corrections in a timely manner .

For instance, is the education technology expected to ensure that learners in early grades excel in foundational skills—basic literacy and numeracy—by age 10? If so, will the technology provide quality reading and math materials, ample opportunities to practice, and engaging materials such as videos or games? Will educators be empowered to use these materials in new ways? And how will progress be measured and adjusted?

4. How this kind of reform is approached can matter immensely for its success.

It is easy to nod to issues of “implementation,” but that needs to be more than rhetorical. Keep in mind that good use of education technology requires thinking about how it will affect learners, educators, and parents. After all, giving learners digital devices will make no difference if they get broken, are stolen, or go unused. Classroom technologies only matter if educators feel comfortable putting them to work. Since good technology is generally about complementing or amplifying what educators and learners already do, it is almost always a mistake to mandate programs from on high. It is vital that technology be adopted with the input of educators and families and with attention to how it will be used. If technology goes unused or if educators use it ineffectually, the results will disappoint—no matter the virtuosity of the technology. Indeed, unused education technology can be an unnecessary expenditure for cash-strapped education systems. This is why surveying context, listening to voices in the field, examining how technology is used, and planning for course correction is essential.

5. It is essential to communicate with a range of stakeholders, including educators, school leaders, parents, and learners .

Technology can feel alien in schools, confuse parents and (especially) older educators, or become an alluring distraction. Good communication can help address all of these risks. Taking care to listen to educators and families can help ensure that programs are informed by their needs and concerns. At the same time, deliberately and consistently explaining what technology is and is not supposed to do, how it can be most effectively used, and the ways in which it can make it more likely that programs work as intended. For instance, if teachers fear that technology is intended to reduce the need for educators, they will tend to be hostile; if they believe that it is intended to assist them in their work, they will be more receptive. Absent effective communication, it is easy for programs to “fail” not because of the technology but because of how it was used. In short, past experience in rolling out education programs indicates that it is as important to have a strong intervention design as it is to have a solid plan to socialize it among stakeholders.

Beyond reopening: A leapfrog moment to transform education?

On September 14, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) will host a webinar to discuss strategies, including around the effective use of education technology, for ensuring resilient schools in the long term and to launch a new education technology playbook “Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?”

file-pdf Full Playbook – Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all? file-pdf References file-pdf Appendix A – Instruments to assess availability and use of technology file-pdf Appendix B – List of reviewed studies file-pdf Appendix C – How may technology affect interactions among students, teachers, and content?

About the Authors

Alejandro j. ganimian, emiliana vegas, frederick m. hess.

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How Has Technology Changed Education?

Technology has impacted almost every aspect of life today, and education is no exception. Or is it? In some ways, education seems much the same as it has been for many years. A 14th century illustration by Laurentius de Voltolina depicts a university lecture in medieval Italy. The scene is easily recognizable because of its parallels to the modern day. The teacher lectures from a podium at the front of the room while the students sit in rows and listen. Some of the students have books open in front of them and appear to be following along. A few look bored. Some are talking to their neighbors. One appears to be sleeping. Classrooms today do not look much different, though you might find modern students looking at their laptops, tablets, or smart phones instead of books (though probably open to Facebook). A cynic would say that technology has done nothing to change education.

However, in many ways, technology has profoundly changed education. For one, technology has greatly expanded access to education. In medieval times, books were rare and only an elite few had access to educational opportunities. Individuals had to travel to centers of learning to get an education. Today, massive amounts of information (books, audio, images, videos) are available at one’s fingertips through the Internet, and opportunities for formal learning are available online worldwide through the Khan Academy, MOOCs, podcasts, traditional online degree programs, and more. Access to learning opportunities today is unprecedented in scope thanks to technology.

Opportunities for communication and collaboration have also been expanded by technology. Traditionally, classrooms have been relatively isolated, and collaboration has been limited to other students in the same classroom or building. Today, technology enables forms of communication and collaboration undreamt of in the past. Students in a classroom in the rural U.S., for example, can learn about the Arctic by following the expedition of a team of scientists in the region, read scientists’ blog posting, view photos, e-mail questions to the scientists, and even talk live with the scientists via a videoconference. Students can share what they are learning with students in other classrooms in other states who are tracking the same expedition. Students can collaborate on group projects using technology-based tools such as wikis and Google docs. The walls of the classrooms are no longer a barrier as technology enables new ways of learning, communicating, and working collaboratively.

Technology has also begun to change the roles of teachers and learners. In the traditional classroom, such as what we see depicted in de Voltolina’s illustration, the teacher is the primary source of information, and the learners passively receive it. This model of the teacher as the “sage on the stage” has been in education for a long time, and it is still very much in evidence today. However, because of the access to information and educational opportunity that technology has enabled, in many classrooms today we see the teacher’s role shifting to the “guide on the side” as students take more responsibility for their own learning using technology to gather relevant information. Schools and universities across the country are beginning to redesign learning spaces to enable this new model of education, foster more interaction and small group work, and use technology as an enabler.

Technology is a powerful tool that can support and transform education in many ways, from making it easier for teachers to create instructional materials to enabling new ways for people to learn and work together. With the worldwide reach of the Internet and the ubiquity of smart devices that can connect to it, a new age of anytime anywhere education is dawning. It will be up to instructional designers and educational technologies to make the most of the opportunities provided by technology to change education so that effective and efficient education is available to everyone everywhere.

You can help shape the influence of technology in education with an Online Master of Science in Education in Learning Design and Technology from Purdue University Online. This accredited program offers studies in exciting new technologies that are shaping education and offers students the opportunity to take part in the future of innovation.

Learn more about the online MSEd in Learning Design and Technology at Purdue University today and help redefine the way in which individuals learn. Call (877) 497-5851 to speak with an admissions advisor or to request more information.

The future of educational technology

Dan Schwartz is a cognitive psychologist and dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

He says that artificial intelligence is a different beast, but he is optimistic about its future in education. “It’s going to change stuff. It’s really an exciting time,” he says. Schwartz imagines a world not where AI is the teacher, but where human students learn by teaching AI chatbots key concepts. It’s called the Protégé Effect, Schwartz says, providing host Russ Altman a glimpse of the future of education on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.

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Related : Dan Schwartz , professor of educational technology

[00:00:00] Dan Schwartz: You know, the tough question for me is, should you let the kid use ChatGPT during the test? Right? And we had this argument over calculators, right? And finally they came up with ways to ask questions where it was okay if the kids had calculators. Because the calculator was doing the routine stuff and that's not really what you cared about. What you cared about was, could the kid be innovative? Could they take another, a second approach to solve a problem? Things like that.

[00:00:33] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If you're enjoying The Future of Everything podcast, please hit the follow button in the app that you're listening to now. This will guarantee that you never miss an episode. 

[00:00:46] Today, Dan Schwartz will tell us how AI is impacting education. He studies educational technology and he finds that there's a lot of promise and a lot of worries about how we're going to use AI in the classroom. It's the future of educational technology. Before we get started, please remember to follow the show in the app that you listen to. You'll be alerted to all of our episodes and it'll make sure that you never miss the future of anything.

[00:01:16] You know, the rise of AI has been on people's minds ever since the release of ChatGPT. Especially the powerful one that started to do things that were scary good. We've seen people using it in business, in sports, in entertainment, and definitely in education. When it comes to education, there are some fundamental questions, however, are we teaching students how to use AI? Or are we teaching students? How do we assess them? Can teachers grade papers with AI? Can students write papers with AI? Why is anybody doing anything? Why don't we just have the AI talk to itself all day? These are real questions that come up in AI. 

[00:01:55] Fortunately, we're going to be talking to Dan Schwartz, who's a professor of education and a dean of the School of Education at Stanford University about how AI is impacting education.

[00:02:06] Dan, the release of ChatGPT has had an impact all over the world, people are using it in all kinds of ways. And clearly one of the areas that AI, especially generative AI has made impact is in education. Students are clearly using it, teachers are thinking about using it or using it. You're the Dean of Education at Stanford. What's your take on the situation right now for AI in education? 

[00:02:33] Dan Schwartz: Okay, so lots of answers to that, but, but, you know, the thing I've enjoyed the most is, uh, showing it to people and watching their reaction. So I'm a cognitive psychologist. I study creativity, learning, what it means to understand. And you show this to people and you just see them go, oh my lord.

[00:02:53] And then the next thing you see is they begin to say, uh, what's left for humans? Like what's left? And then they sort of say, wait a minute, will there be any jobs? And then finally they sort of say. Oh my goodness, education needs to change. And as a dean who raises money for a school, this is the best thing to ever happen. No, whether it's good or bad, it doesn't matter. Everybody realizes it's going to change stuff. And so it's really an exciting time. 

[00:03:22] Russ Altman: So that is really good news. I have to say going into this and I have to reveal a bias. I have often wondered if technology has any place in a classroom. And I think it's because I was, uh, I was injured as a youth.

[00:03:37] This is in the 1970s when some teachers tried to put a computer program in front of me and I was a pretty motivated student and I worked with this computer for about six minutes, and I should say, I'm not an anti-computer person. I literally spent all my time writing algorithms and doing computation work. But I just felt as a youth that I wanted to have a teacher in front of me, a human telling me things. Uh, and so that is clearly not the direction, I hear you laughing. So talk to me about the appropriate way to think about computers. Because I really have a big negative reaction to the idea of anything standing between me and a teacher.

[00:04:18] Dan Schwartz: You must have had very good teachers. 

[00:04:19] Russ Altman: I might have. 

[00:04:19] Dan Schwartz: So Russ, you sound like someone who doesn't play video games. 

[00:04:23] Russ Altman: I do not play video games. 

[00:04:24] Dan Schwartz: So there's this world out there where people can experience things they could never experience, uh, directly. And no teacher can deliver this immersive experience of you in the Amazon searching for anthropological artifacts. There's also something called social media that people use. 

[00:04:43] Russ Altman: I've heard about this. 

[00:04:43] Dan Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:04:44] Russ Altman: I think we disseminate the show using it. 

[00:04:46] Dan Schwartz: So back in the day. 

[00:04:47] Russ Altman: Okay. So I'm a dinosaur. 

[00:04:49] Dan Schwartz: Uh, back in the day, you got the Apple 2 maybe, and it's about 64 K, maybe. It's got a big floppy drive and it takes all its CPU power to draw a picture of a two plus two on the screen. So I think things have changed a little bit Russ. But I appreciate your desire to be connected to teachers. I don't think we're replacing them. 

[00:05:14] Russ Altman: I'm not going to give you a lecture about teaching. But I will say this one sentence that was reverberating through my brain when I was getting ready for our interview, which was when I'm in a classroom, and this has been since I've been in third grade. I am watching the teacher trying to understand, how they think about the information and how they struggle with it to like understand it and then try to relay it to me.

[00:05:34] And so it is, that's where I'm learning. I'm, it's not even what they're saying. It's they're painting a picture for their cognitive model of what they're talking about. And that's what I'm trying to pull out to this day. And so that's why I have such a negative reaction to anything standing between me and this other human who has a model that is more advanced than mine about the material that we're struggling with and I just, I'm trying to download that model. 

[00:06:01] Dan Schwartz: Wow. You're, you are a cognitive psychologist, Russ? 

[00:06:03] Russ Altman: I don't know. 

[00:06:05] Dan Schwartz: Like I had a buddy who sort of became a Nobel laureate. And he talked about how he loved take apart cars, and I'd say I love to watch you take apart cars, just to figure out what you're doing. No, so I think, let's separate this. There's the part where you think the interaction with the teacher is important. I don't know that you need it eight hours a day. You know, that's an awful lot of interaction. I'm not sure I want to be with my mom and dad for eight hours a day trying to figure out their thinking. So you don't need it all the time.

[00:06:34] On the other side, you know, we can do creative things with the computers. So for example, I wrote a program where students learn by teaching a computer agent. And so they're trying to figure out how to get the agent to think the way it should in the domain. Turns out it's highly motivating. The kids learn a lot. The problem was the technology quickly became obsolete. Because after kids used it for a couple of days, they no longer needed it, 'cause they'd figured out sort of how to do the kind of reasoning that we wanted them to teach the agent to do for reasoning. 

[00:07:06] Russ Altman: That's exactly what I was talking about before, about my relationship with my teacher. And you just flipped it, but it's the same idea, which is that there's a cognitive model that you're trying to transfer. And by doing that transfer, you get in, you introspect on it and you understand what it is that you're thinking about. 

[00:07:22] Dan Schwartz: I think that's right. You know, so the concern is the computer does all the work, right? And so I'm just sitting there pressing a button that isn't relevant to the domain I'm trying to learn. But you know, uh, one of the things computers are really good at, like as good as casinos, is motivation. So some computer programs, they gamify it. I'm not sure that's a great use of it. Because you, you know, you try and you learn to just beat the game for the reward. 

[00:07:49] Russ Altman: Right.

[00:07:49] Dan Schwartz: As opposed to learn the content. But things like having, teaching an intelligent agent how to think. There's something called the protege effect, which is you'll try harder to learn the content to teach your agent than you will to prepare for a test. Right? So we can make the computer pretty social. 

[00:08:08] Russ Altman: Okay. So you are clearly a technology optimist in education. And in addition to the amazing fundraising and like, there's so many questions to be answered. What I think a lot of people are worried about is, are we at risk of losing a gen. We've already lost a few generations of students, some people argue, because of the pandemic and the terrible impact it had, especially on, uh, on people who weren't privileged in society and in their education.

[00:08:34] Are we about to enter yet another shock to the system where, because of the ease of having essays written and having, and grading papers, that we really don't serve a generation of students well? Or do you think that's a overhyped, unlikely to happen thing? 

[00:08:51] Dan Schwartz: No, it's a good question. You know, that part of this is people's view about cheating, you know? And so it's too easy for students to do certain things. But there's another response that I want to hang on to. I want to ask you, Russ, are you using, you teach. 

[00:09:07] Russ Altman: Yeah. 

[00:09:07] Dan Schwartz: Are you like putting in all sorts of rules to prevent students from cheating, or are you saying, use it, do whatever you can. I'm going to outsmart your technique anyway.

[00:09:17] Russ Altman: It's a little bit more on the latter. So we, uh, I teach an ethics class, which is a writing class. And we allow ChatGPT because the, my fellow instructor and I decided, and this was the quote, we want to be part of the future, not part of the past. So we said to the students, 

[00:09:33] Dan Schwartz: Sorry, The Future of Everything, Russ.

[00:09:34] Russ Altman: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks for the plug. So, uh, we allow it. We asked them to tell us what prompt they used and to show us the initial output that they got from that prompt. And then we, of course, have them hand in the final thing. And we instruct the TAs and ourselves, when we grade that we're grading the final product with or without a declaration of whether ChatGPT is used.

[00:09:56] We do have engineers as TAs, which means that they did a careful analysis. Students who used ChatGPT, and I don't think this is a surprise, got slightly lower grades, but spend substantially less time on the assignment. So if you're a busy student, you might say, I will make that trade off because the grades weren't a ton worse. It was like two points out of a hundred, like from a ninety to an eighty-eight, and they completed it in like half the time. 

[00:10:25] Dan Schwartz: Uh, do you think they learned less? 

[00:10:28] Russ Altman: So we don't know. We don't know. And, uh, the evaluation of learning is something that I'm looking to you, Dan. Uh, how do I tell? So, um, so we do try to use it. But we are stressed out. We have seen cases where people say they used ChatGPT, but tried to mislead us in how they use it. They said, I only used it for copy editing, but it was clear that they did more than copy editing with it. And so there's at the edges, there are some challenges. But in the end, we said motivated students who want to learn will use it as a tool and we'll learn. And the students who we have failed to motivate, and it is our failure, you could argue. They're just going to do whatever they do, and we're not going to be able to really impact that trajectory very much. 

[00:11:12] Dan Schwartz: Yeah, you know, you sort of see the same thing with video, video-based lectures. So I'm online. I've got this lecture. Do I really want to sit and listen to the whole thing? Not really. I'm going to skim forward to find the information. I skim back. I'm probably going to end up doing the minimum amount if it's not a great lecture. 

[00:11:29] Russ Altman: Yeah.

[00:11:29] Dan Schwartz: So I'm not sure this is a ChatGPT phenomenon. It's just, it's sort of an enabler. I think the challenge is thinking of the right assignment. So like, you can grade things on novel and appropriateness. So, are they novel? You know, if they use ChatGPT like everybody else, they won't be novel. They'll all produce the same thing. 

[00:11:48] Russ Altman: It's incredibly, yes. It, so it is, um, there's the most common type of, uh, moral theory is called common morality. And it turns out that ChatGPT does pretty well at that one because there's so many examples that it has seen. And it's terrible at Kant. Deontology, it really can't do. Okay, so let me. 

[00:12:07] Dan Schwartz: So let me get back to your question. 

[00:12:09] Russ Altman: Yeah. 

[00:12:09] Dan Schwartz: So here's what I see going on right now. There, there are like, uh, big industry conferences. Because they're going to, they're producing the technology that schools can adopt. Right? And there's a lot of money there. And twenty years ago, there were zero unicorns, and about, uh, I think last year, fifty-four billion dollar valuation companies in ed tech. So this is a big change. So what are they doing? They're basically creating things to do stuff to students, right? 

[00:12:42] So maybe they're marketing to the teachers, but it's, you know, it's, I'll make a tutor that, uh, is more efficient at delivering information to the students. Or, I will make a program that can correct their math very quickly. And so what's happening is the industry is sort of using the AI in the way that nobody else uses it.

[00:13:04] Because everybody who's got this tool wants to create stuff, right? Like, uh, my brother. It's my birthday, what does he do? He has ChatGPT to write me a poem about Dan Schwartz at Stanford. What he doesn't know is that there's a lot of Dan Schwartz's and so evidently I wear colorful ties, but this is what everybody wants to do. They want to create with it. Meanwhile, the field is trying to push towards efficiency. Can we get the kids done faster? Can we get them through the curriculum faster? Can we correct them faster? In which case the kids are going to optimize for being really efficient, right? As opposed to just trying to be creative, innovative, use it for deeper kinds of things. So this is my big fear. 

[00:13:42] Russ Altman: And so you're watching these companies and I'm guessing that they don't always ask your opinion about what's, what would you tell, so let's say a, one of these unicorn billion dollar or more companies comes to you and says, we want to do this right. We want to use the best educational research to create AI that can bring education to people who might otherwise not have quality education. What would you tell them? 

[00:14:04] Dan Schwartz: So this is a challenge, right? This is something we're actively trying to solve. So we've created a Stanford accelerator for learning to kind of figure out how to do this. 'Cause I've been in this ed tech position for quite a while. And the companies come in and they say, we really want your opinion. And then they present what they're doing. And I go, uh, have you ever thought of, and they go, wait, let me finish. And this goes on for fifty-five minutes. Where they're telling me what they want to do. And I'm trying to say, you know, if you just did this. And the way it ends is I say to them, look, you, if you do these three things, I'll consider being an advisor.

[00:14:42] Russ Altman: Right.

[00:14:42] Dan Schwartz: They never come back. 

[00:14:45] Russ Altman: So the message you're sending them is just not in their worldview. 

[00:14:50] Dan Schwartz: It's because they have a vision. Everybody wants to start their own school. 

[00:14:53] Russ Altman: Yeah. 

[00:14:53] Dan Schwartz: They have their vision of what it should be and they're urgent to get it done. And you know, it's a startup mentality. So trying to figure out how can we educate them? You know, I think we know a lot about how people learn that, uh, that we didn't know twenty years ago when they went to school. And the AI, you know, one of the things it can do is implement some of these theories of learning in ways that don't exist in textbooks and things like that.

[00:15:17] So that's the big hope. And the question is, how can you take advantage of industry? You know, education is a public good, but they still buy all their products. And so going through those companies is one way to sort of bring a positive revolution. But again, I'm a little worried that the companies are, and they're sort of optimizing for local minima.

[00:15:41] Russ Altman: Yeah. 

[00:15:41] Dan Schwartz: You know, to accommodate the current schools and things like that. 

[00:15:44] Russ Altman: Should we take, so what, should we take solace in the teachers? So many of us are fans of teachers, grammar school teachers, middle school teachers, high school teachers, but many of these folks are incredibly dedicated. Will they be a final, um, uh, a final filter that looks at these, uh, educational technologies and says, absolutely not. Or yeah, we'll use that, but we're going to use that in a way that makes sense for my way of teaching. Or are they not in a position to make those kinds of, what you could call courageous decisions, about kind of modifying the use of these tools to make them as good as possible in, uh, on the ground? 

[00:16:21] Dan Schwartz: So it's pretty interesting. The surveys I've seen, uh, sort of over the last year, the different groups do different surveys. It, it sort of, if I take the average, about sixty percent of K 12 teachers are using GenAI, right? And about thirty percent of the kids. If I go to the college level, about thirty percent of the faculty are using GenAI in teaching and about eighty percent of the kids are using it. So I do think in the pre K to 12 space, the teachers are making decisions. They do a lot of curriculum. There are, so a great application is, um, project-based learning. So project-based learning is a lot of fun. Kids learn a lot. They sort of develop a passion, a certain depth. As opposed to just mastering sort of the requirements, but it's really hard to manage. You know, when I was a high school teacher, I had a hundred and thirty kids, right?

[00:17:11] If all of them have a separate project, I have to help plan them and make them goal, you know, learning goal appropriate. So the GenAI can help me do that. It can help me, uh, have the kids sort of help use it to help them design a successful project. Uh, it can help me with a dashboard that helps manage them, hitting their milestones, things like that.

[00:17:31] And there, you know, it's, it, the, teacher is like, I can do something I just couldn't do before. 

[00:17:35] Russ Altman: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:17:36] Dan Schwartz: It's different than the model where you put the kids in the back of the room who finished early and say, go use the computer. I think, you know, most schools, kids are carrying computers in classes. So it's a little different. It's more integrated than it used to be. 

[00:17:52] Russ Altman: This is the Future of Everything with Russ Altman. More with Dan Schwartz, next.

[00:18:06] Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman and I'm speaking with Dan Schwartz, professor of education at Stanford University. 

[00:18:12] In the last segment, Dan told us about AI, education, some of the promises and some of the pitfalls that he's looking at on the ground, thinking about how to educate the next generation.

[00:18:23] In this segment, I'm going to ask him about assessment, grading. How do we do that with AI and how do we make sure it goes well? Also going to ask him about physical activity, which turns out physical ness is an important part of learning. 

[00:18:39] I want to get a little bit more detailed, Dan, in this next segment, and I want to start off with assessment, grading. I know you've thought about this a lot. People are worried that um, AI is going to start to doing, be doing all the grading. Everybody knows that a high school teacher with a big, couple of big classes can spend their entire weekend grading essays. It is so tempting just to feed that into ChatGPT and say, hey, how good is this essay? How should we think about, maybe worry about, but maybe just think about, assessment in education in the future? 

[00:19:11] Dan Schwartz: Yeah, this was, uh, you remember the MOOCs? 

[00:19:14] Russ Altman: Yes. 

[00:19:14] Dan Schwartz: Massively online, open courses. And, uh, you're hoping you have ten thousand students, and then you gotta grade the papers for ten thousand students. So what do you do? You give a multiple-choice tests, which can be machine coded, right? So, so I think that's always there. I'm going to take it a slightly different direction, which is, uh, I'm interacting with a computer system and while I'm interacting with it, it's, it can be constantly assessing in real time, right?

[00:19:41] And so there's a field that's sometimes called educational data mining or learning analytics. And there's thousands of people who are working on, how do I get informative signal out of students interactions. Like, are they trying to game the system? Are they reflecting? And so forth. So this is something the computer can do pretty well, right?

[00:20:02] It can sort of track what students are doing, assess, and then ideally deliver the right piece of instruction at the moment. So yours, you could use the assessments to give people a grade, but really the more important thing is, can you use the assessments to make instructional decisions? So I think this is a big area of advancement, but here's my concern.

[00:20:25] We've gotten very good at assessing things that are objectively right and wrong. Like did you remember the right word? Did you get two plus two correctly? For most of the things we care about now, they're like strategic and heuristic, which means it's not a guaranteed right answer. And so what you really want to do is assess students choices for what to do. So for example, uh, creativity, it's just for the most part, it's a large set of strategies. Right? There's a bunch of strategies that help you be creative. The question is, do the students choose to do that or do they take the safe route? 'Cause creativity is a risk, right? 'Cause you're not sure.

[00:21:02] So I think this is where the field needs to go. Is being willing to say that certain kinds of choices about learning are better than others. Uh, and it's a, it becomes more of an ethical question now. Instead of saying two plus two equals four, there's no ethics to it. 

[00:21:16] Russ Altman: Are you going to be able to convince non educators who hold purse strings, let's call them the government, that these kinds of assessments are important and need to be included? Because my sense is that when it filters up to boards of education or elected leaders, a lot of that stuff goes out of the window. And they just want to know how good are they at reading comprehensive and can they do enough math to be competitive with, you know, country X? 

[00:21:43] Dan Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah. So different assessments serve different purposes. Like the big year end tests that kids take, those aren't to inform the instruction of that child. They're not even for that teacher. They're for school districts to decide are our policies working. And so it's really a different kind of assessment than me as a teacher trying to decide what should I give the kid next. So I think it's going to vary. You know, the tough question for me is should you let the kid use ChatGPT during the test? Right?

[00:22:14] And we had this argument over calculators, right? And finally they came up with ways to ask questions where it was okay if the kids had calculators. Because the calculator was doing the routine stuff. And that's not really what you cared about. What you cared about was, could the kid be innovative? Could they take a, another, a second approach to solve a problem? 

[00:22:34] Russ Altman: Yeah. 

[00:22:34] Dan Schwartz: Things like that. 

[00:22:34] Russ Altman: We, so I teach another class where it's a programming class, the students write programs, and we have switched, um, and we've actually downgraded the value. So as you know, very well, just as background, there is now an amazing, ChatGPT can also write computer code essentially. And so a lot of coding now is kind of done for you and you don't need to do it. We are trying to make sure that they understand the algorithms that we ask them to code. And so what we're doing is we're downgrading the amount of points you get for working code.

[00:23:04] You still get some, but we're upgrading the quiz about how the algorithm works. Do you understand exactly why this happened the way it did? Why is this data structure a good choice or a bad choice? And so it's forcing us, and you could have argued that we should have done this twenty years ago in the same class, but this is making it a more urgent issue, because if we don't, people can just get an automatic piece of code. They can run it. It'll work. They have no understanding of what happened. And so it's really a positive. It's putting more of a burden on us to figure out why the heck did we have them write this code in the first place? 

[00:23:39] Dan Schwartz: No, this was my point. It makes you sort of rethink what is valuable to learn. And you stop doing what was easy to grade. So I have an interesting one. This is a little nerdy. 

[00:23:51] Russ Altman: Okay. I love it. I love it. 

[00:23:52] Dan Schwartz: I teach the intro PhD statistics course in education. And lots of students say, I took statistics, right? And I'm sort of like, well, that's great. Let me ask you one question. And I say, I'm going to email you a question and you'll have five minutes to respond. You let me know when you're ready for it. And I ask them, uh, this is just for you, Russ. But why is the tail of the T distribution fat in small sample sizes? And I, what I get back usually is because they're small sample sizes.

[00:24:24] Russ Altman: Right. Or because it's the T distribution. 

[00:24:27] Dan Schwartz: Or it's, yes, even better. And then I come back and I sort of say, well, have you ever heard of the standard error? And I begin to get at the conceptual stuff, right? And, uh, I suspect if I gave it, uh, so there are ways to get conceptual questions that are really important. But you know, being able to prompt or write R code, you know, that's a good thing. You want them to learn the skills as well. 

[00:24:50] Russ Altman: Exactly. 

[00:24:51] Dan Schwartz: So I don't know, you know, when the calculator showed up, there's a big debate, right? What should students learn? Can they use the calculator? The apocryphal solution was you had to learn the regular math and the calculator now. You just had to learn twice as much. And so maybe that's what it's going to be. 

[00:25:08] Russ Altman: And that's a very likely transitional strategy and then we'll see where we end up. Okay. In the final few minutes, I, this seems like it's unrelated to AI, but I bet it's not. You've done a lot of work on physical activity and learning. You've even been on a paper recently where you talk about having a walk during a teaching session and whether you get better outcomes than if you were just standing or sitting. So tell me about that interest and tell me if it has anything to do with today's topic. 

[00:25:37] Dan Schwartz: I can make the bridge. I can do it, Russ. Right. So we did some studies. Um, I've done a lot of it. It's called embodiment where, yeah, there was, I got clued into this where, uh, I was asking people about why, about gears. And I say, you know, you have three gears in a line, and you turn the gear on the left clockwise. What does the gear on the right do? Far right. And I'd watch them, and they'd go like this with their hands. They'd model with their hands. And then I was sort of like, well, what's the basis of this? And I'd say well why? And they say because this one's turning that way that one, I go but why. And in the end, they just bottom out. They just show me their hands. They didn't say things like one molecule displaces another. 

[00:26:20] Russ Altman: Right. 

[00:26:21] Dan Schwartz: So that sort of clued me in. 

[00:26:22] Russ Altman: This pinky is going up and this other pinky is going down. 

[00:26:26] Dan Schwartz: Yes. 

[00:26:26] Russ Altman: What don't you understand about that? 

[00:26:28] Dan Schwartz: Pretty much. Well, it was nonverbal. 

[00:26:31] Russ Altman: Yeah. 

[00:26:31] Dan Schwartz: So we went on, you know, we discovered that the basis for negative numbers, right? Is actually perceptual symmetry. And we did some neuro stuff. And so the question is sort of how does this perceptual apparatus, which some people, we're just loaded with perception, right? The brain's just one giant perceiving. So how do you get that going? So part of the embodiment is my ability to take action, right? And so this is where we started, right? Right now, the AI feels very verbal, very abstract. Even the video generation, it's amazing, but it's pretty passive for me. So enter virtual worlds, they're still working on the form factor where I can move my hand in space. 

[00:27:16] Russ Altman: Yeah. 

[00:27:17] Dan Schwartz: And something will happen in the environment in response to that. You know, I think medicine is, you know, really been working on haptics so surgeons can practice. Uh, there was a great guy who made a virtual world for different heart congenital defects, and you could go in and practice surgery and see what would happen to the blood flow. So I think, uh, that embodiment where you get to bring all your senses to bear, it's not just words, but it's everything, can really do a lot for learning, for engagement, uh, not just physical skills. 

[00:27:49] Russ Altman: So that's a challenge to, I'm hearing a challenge to AI, which is as an educator, you know that this physicality can be an critical part of learning. And by the way, would this be a surprise? I mean, we're, we've been on earth evolving for several hundred million years. And, uh, you would be surprised if our ability to manipulate and look at three dimensional situations wasn't critical to learning, and yet that's not what AI is doing right now. So this is a clear challenge to AI among other things. 

[00:28:17] Dan Schwartz: Right. So, uh, I have a colleague, Renate Fruchter. And, uh, she teaches architecture, and she has students make a blueprint for the building, right? And then she feeds the blueprint to a CAD system that creates the building. She then takes the building and puts it into a physics engine, it can basically render the building and make walls so you can't move through them, and it has gravity and things like that.

[00:28:42] She then puts the, uh, original student who designed the building in a wheelchair and has them try to navigate through that environment. At which point they sort of understand, oh this is why you need so much space so they can turn around, so they can navigate near the door. I am sure that is an incredibly compelling experience that allows them to be generative about all their future designs.

[00:29:03] So yeah, this is a challenge and part of the co-mingling of the AI and the virtual worlds, I think this is a big challenge. It's computationally very heavy, but it will open the door for lots of ways of teaching that you just couldn't do before. 

[00:29:17] Russ Altman: Thanks to Dan Schwartz. That was the future of educational technology.

[00:29:21] You've been listening to The Future of Everything and I'm Russ Altman. You know what? We have an archive with more than 250 back episodes of The Future of Everything. So you have instant access to a wide array of discussions that can keep you entertained and informed. Also, remember to rate, review, and follow. I care deeply about that request. 

[00:29:41] And also, if you want to follow me, you can follow me on X @ @RBAltman, and you can follow Stanford Engineering @ StanfordENG.

The future of AI at work

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New stanford hydrogel to reduce damage of california wildfires.

• Media mentions

TED-Ed Educator Talks

TED-Ed's Educator Talks program brings educators (teachers, principals, Ed consultants, CEOs, nonprofit leaders and industry trailblazers) to consider and share the most relevant and transformational ideas in the education landscape across the globe. All of the educators featured are developed, coached and curated through TED's coaches to deliver their ideas on the TED stage.

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Educational technology, planning instruction & learning activities ( read full series ), what is it.

One definition of educational technology includes practical elements of the discipline, such as “the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources” (Reid, 2018). A critical aspect of educational technology (ed tech) are the technological tools which course designers, instructors, and instructional designers draw from to enhance their teaching and to support students’ learning. 

Student success is largely linked to the integration of technology for teaching and learning purposes. Research suggests that technology use in the classroom can help boost student engagement and academic success (Schlosser et al., 2022). McClean and Crowe (2017) showed an increase in overall student engagement and an improvement with student learning outcomes through facilitating interactive activities throughout a lecture-based course. Research also shows that when implemented effectively, technological tools can also positively impact students’ cognitive abilities and higher order thinking (Schlosser, 2022).

• 90% of surveyed university administrators agreed that more time will be devoted to using educational technology in future classrooms ( Coffey, 2024 ).

Teaching Strategies

• Ed tech tools can be integrated for a variety of purposes:
• Active learning.  Incorporate anonymous polling and Q&A, and foster interactive large classes with platforms such as  PollEverywhere ,  Mentimeter , and  Slido . 
• Effective feedback.  Use  Canvas or  Aggie Video to create brief recorded video feedback. Canvas also supports  embedding videos from AggieVideo or YouTube. 
• Grading and assessment.  Embed rubrics directly into  Canvas assignments to provide clarity to students regarding expectations, as well as to make for more efficient and transparent grading. 
• Inclusive teaching.  Anonymously survey your students so you can learn what your students might need to be successful in your course (e.g.,  Canvas ,  Google Forms , or  Qualtrics ). 
• Reflection and metacognition. Ask students to complete quick Exit Tickets via  Canvas or  Google Forms at the end of class or at the end of the week (e.g., Minute Paper or Muddiest Point).

Knowledge organization.  Use concept map platforms, such as  Miro ,  MindMeister ,  Jamboard , and  Padlet .

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Students say ...

• “In one class, the instructor used google forms, mentimeter, and polls to break up the lecture. This made the class more interesting.”
• “The professor set up google doc folders for each group. This really helped with organization and communication. She also used them to leave us feedback, which really helped us improve our project."
• Consider the situational context of your course. Format of your class (i.e., blended, hybrid, or fully remote)? Teaching in a flipped classroom? Student level? Physical setup of the classroom? Characteristics of the students? How many students? Length and frequency of class meetings?
• For effective tool integration, how do you answer the following: What teaching challenge are you trying to solve? What tools can support this? How can you best implement the tool?

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Information and communication technology (ICT) in education

Information and communications technology (ict) can impact student learning when teachers are digitally literate and understand how to integrate it into curriculum..

Schools use a diverse set of ICT tools to communicate, create, disseminate, store, and manage information.(6) In some contexts, ICT has also become integral to the teaching-learning interaction, through such approaches as replacing chalkboards with interactive digital whiteboards, using students’ own smartphones or other devices for learning during class time, and the “flipped classroom” model where students watch lectures at home on the computer and use classroom time for more interactive exercises.

When teachers are digitally literate and trained to use ICT, these approaches can lead to higher order thinking skills, provide creative and individualized options for students to express their understandings, and leave students better prepared to deal with ongoing technological change in society and the workplace.(18)

ICT issues planners must consider include: considering the total cost-benefit equation, supplying and maintaining the requisite infrastructure, and ensuring investments are matched with teacher support and other policies aimed at effective ICT use.(16)

Issues and Discussion

Digital culture and digital literacy: Computer technologies and other aspects of digital culture have changed the ways people live, work, play, and learn, impacting the construction and distribution of knowledge and power around the world.(14) Graduates who are less familiar with digital culture are increasingly at a disadvantage in the national and global economy. Digital literacy—the skills of searching for, discerning, and producing information, as well as the critical use of new media for full participation in society—has thus become an important consideration for curriculum frameworks.(8)

In many countries, digital literacy is being built through the incorporation of information and communication technology (ICT) into schools. Some common educational applications of ICT include:

• One laptop per child: Less expensive laptops have been designed for use in school on a 1:1 basis with features like lower power consumption, a low cost operating system, and special re-programming and mesh network functions.(42) Despite efforts to reduce costs, however, providing one laptop per child may be too costly for some developing countries.(41)
• Tablets: Tablets are small personal computers with a touch screen, allowing input without a keyboard or mouse. Inexpensive learning software (“apps”) can be downloaded onto tablets, making them a versatile tool for learning.(7)(25) The most effective apps develop higher order thinking skills and provide creative and individualized options for students to express their understandings.(18)
• Interactive White Boards or Smart Boards : Interactive white boards allow projected computer images to be displayed, manipulated, dragged, clicked, or copied.(3) Simultaneously, handwritten notes can be taken on the board and saved for later use. Interactive white boards are associated with whole-class instruction rather than student-centred activities.(38) Student engagement is generally higher when ICT is available for student use throughout the classroom.(4)
• E-readers : E-readers are electronic devices that can hold hundreds of books in digital form, and they are increasingly utilized in the delivery of reading material.(19) Students—both skilled readers and reluctant readers—have had positive responses to the use of e-readers for independent reading.(22) Features of e-readers that can contribute to positive use include their portability and long battery life, response to text, and the ability to define unknown words.(22) Additionally, many classic book titles are available for free in e-book form.
• Flipped Classrooms: The flipped classroom model, involving lecture and practice at home via computer-guided instruction and interactive learning activities in class, can allow for an expanded curriculum. There is little investigation on the student learning outcomes of flipped classrooms.(5) Student perceptions about flipped classrooms are mixed, but generally positive, as they prefer the cooperative learning activities in class over lecture.(5)(35)

ICT and Teacher Professional Development: Teachers need specific professional development opportunities in order to increase their ability to use ICT for formative learning assessments, individualized instruction, accessing online resources, and for fostering student interaction and collaboration.(15) Such training in ICT should positively impact teachers’ general attitudes towards ICT in the classroom, but it should also provide specific guidance on ICT teaching and learning within each discipline. Without this support, teachers tend to use ICT for skill-based applications, limiting student academic thinking.(32) To sup­port teachers as they change their teaching, it is also essential for education managers, supervisors, teacher educators, and decision makers to be trained in ICT use.(11)

Ensuring benefits of ICT investments: To ensure the investments made in ICT benefit students, additional conditions must be met. School policies need to provide schools with the minimum acceptable infrastructure for ICT, including stable and affordable internet connectivity and security measures such as filters and site blockers. Teacher policies need to target basic ICT literacy skills, ICT use in pedagogical settings, and discipline-specific uses. (21) Successful imple­mentation of ICT requires integration of ICT in the curriculum. Finally, digital content needs to be developed in local languages and reflect local culture. (40) Ongoing technical, human, and organizational supports on all of these issues are needed to ensure access and effective use of ICT. (21)

Resource Constrained Contexts: The total cost of ICT ownership is considerable: training of teachers and administrators, connectivity, technical support, and software, amongst others. (42) When bringing ICT into classrooms, policies should use an incremental pathway, establishing infrastructure and bringing in sustainable and easily upgradable ICT. (16) Schools in some countries have begun allowing students to bring their own mobile technology (such as laptop, tablet, or smartphone) into class rather than providing such tools to all students—an approach called Bring Your Own Device. (1)(27)(34) However, not all families can afford devices or service plans for their children. (30) Schools must ensure all students have equitable access to ICT devices for learning.

Inclusiveness Considerations

Digital Divide: The digital divide refers to disparities of digital media and internet access both within and across countries, as well as the gap between people with and without the digital literacy and skills to utilize media and internet.(23)(26)(31) The digital divide both creates and reinforces socio-economic inequalities of the world’s poorest people. Policies need to intentionally bridge this divide to bring media, internet, and digital literacy to all students, not just those who are easiest to reach.

Minority language groups: Students whose mother tongue is different from the official language of instruction are less likely to have computers and internet connections at home than students from the majority. There is also less material available to them online in their own language, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to their majority peers who gather information, prepare talks and papers, and communicate more using ICT. (39) Yet ICT tools can also help improve the skills of minority language students—especially in learning the official language of instruction—through features such as automatic speech recognition, the availability of authentic audio-visual materials, and chat functions. (2)(17)

Students with different styles of learning: ICT can provide diverse options for taking in and processing information, making sense of ideas, and expressing learning. Over 87% of students learn best through visual and tactile modalities, and ICT can help these students ‘experience’ the information instead of just reading and hearing it. (20)(37) Mobile devices can also offer programmes (“apps”) that provide extra support to students with special needs, with features such as simplified screens and instructions, consistent placement of menus and control features, graphics combined with text, audio feedback, ability to set pace and level of difficulty, appropriate and unambiguous feedback, and easy error correction. (24)(29)

Plans and policies

• India [ PDF ]
• Detroit, USA [ PDF ]
• Finland [ PDF ]
• Alberta Education. 2012. Bring your own device: A guide for schools . Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/admin/technology/research.aspx
• Alsied, S.M. and Pathan, M.M. 2015. ‘The use of computer technology in EFL classroom: Advantages and implications.’ International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies . 1 (1).
• BBC. N.D. ‘What is an interactive whiteboard?’ Retrieved from http://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/Whatisaninteractivewhiteboard.aspx
• Beilefeldt, T. 2012. ‘Guidance for technology decisions from classroom observation.’ Journal of Research on Technology in Education . 44 (3).
• Bishop, J.L. and Verleger, M.A. 2013. ‘The flipped classroom: A survey of the research.’ Presented at the 120th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. Atlanta, Georgia.
• Blurton, C. 2000. New Directions of ICT-Use in Education . United National Education Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO).
• Bryant, B.R., Ok, M., Kang, E.Y., Kim, M.K., Lang, R., Bryant, D.P. and Pfannestiel, K. 2015. ‘Performance of fourth-grade students with learning disabilities on multiplication facts comparing teacher-mediated and technology-mediated interventions: A preliminary investigation. Journal of Behavioral Education. 24.
• Buckingham, D. 2005. Educación en medios. Alfabetización, aprendizaje y cultura contemporánea, Barcelona, Paidós.
• Buckingham, D., Sefton-Green, J., and Scanlon, M. 2001. 'Selling the Digital Dream: Marketing Education Technologies to Teachers and Parents.'  ICT, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum: Subject to Change . London: Routledge.
• "Burk, R. 2001. 'E-book devices and the marketplace: In search of customers.' Library Hi Tech 19 (4)."
• Chapman, D., and Mählck, L. (Eds). 2004. Adapting technology for school improvement: a global perspective. Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning.
• Cheung, A.C.K and Slavin, R.E. 2012. ‘How features of educational technology applications affect student reading outcomes: A meta-analysis.’ Educational Research Review . 7.
• Cheung, A.C.K and Slavin, R.E. 2013. ‘The effectiveness of educational technology applications for enhancing mathematics achievement in K-12 classrooms: A meta-analysis.’ Educational Research Review . 9.
• Deuze, M. 2006. 'Participation Remediation Bricolage - Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture.' The Information Society . 22 .
• Dunleavy, M., Dextert, S. and Heinecke, W.F. 2007. ‘What added value does a 1:1 student to laptop ratio bring to technology-supported teaching and learning?’ Journal of Computer Assisted Learning . 23.
• Enyedy, N. 2014. Personalized Instruction: New Interest, Old Rhetoric, Limited Results, and the Need for a New Direction for Computer-Mediated Learning . Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.
• Golonka, E.M., Bowles, A.R., Frank, V.M., Richardson, D.L. and Freynik, S. 2014. ‘Technologies for foreign language learning: A review of technology types and their effectiveness.’ Computer Assisted Language Learning . 27 (1).
• Goodwin, K. 2012. Use of Tablet Technology in the Classroom . Strathfield, New South Wales: NSW Curriculum and Learning Innovation Centre.
• Jung, J., Chan-Olmsted, S., Park, B., and Kim, Y. 2011. 'Factors affecting e-book reader awareness, interest, and intention to use.' New Media & Society . 14 (2)
• Kenney, L. 2011. ‘Elementary education, there’s an app for that. Communication technology in the elementary school classroom.’ The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications . 2 (1).
• Kopcha, T.J. 2012. ‘Teachers’ perceptions of the barriers to technology integration and practices with technology under situated professional development.’ Computers and Education . 59.
• Miranda, T., Williams-Rossi, D., Johnson, K., and McKenzie, N. 2011. "Reluctant readers in middle school: Successful engagement with text using the e-reader.' International journal of applied science and technology . 1 (6).
• Moyo, L. 2009. 'The digital divide: scarcity, inequality and conflict.' Digital Cultures . New York: Open University Press.
• Newton, D.A. and Dell, A.G. 2011. ‘Mobile devices and students with disabilities: What do best practices tell us?’ Journal of Special Education Technology . 26 (3).
• Nirvi, S. (2011). ‘Special education pupils find learning tool in iPad applications.’ Education Week . 30 .
• Norris, P. 2001. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide . Cambridge, USA: Cambridge University Press.
• Project Tomorrow. 2012. Learning in the 21st century: Mobile devices + social media = personalized learning . Washington, D.C.: Blackboard K-12.
• Riasati, M.J., Allahyar, N. and Tan, K.E. 2012. ‘Technology in language education: Benefits and barriers.’ Journal of Education and Practice . 3 (5).
• Rodriquez, C.D., Strnadova, I. and Cumming, T. 2013. ‘Using iPads with students with disabilities: Lessons learned from students, teachers, and parents.’ Intervention in School and Clinic . 49 (4).
• Sangani, K. 2013. 'BYOD to the classroom.' Engineering & Technology . 3 (8).
• Servon, L. 2002. Redefining the Digital Divide: Technology, Community and Public Policy . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
• Smeets, E. 2005. ‘Does ICT contribute to powerful learning environments in primary education?’ Computers and Education. 44 .
• Smith, G.E. and Thorne, S. 2007. Differentiating Instruction with Technology in K-5 Classrooms . Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.
• Song, Y. 2014. '"Bring your own device (BYOD)" for seamless science inquiry in a primary school.' Computers & Education. 74 .
• Strayer, J.F. 2012. ‘How learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task orientation.’ Learning Environment Research. 15.
• Tamim, R.M., Bernard, R.M., Borokhovski, E., Abrami, P.C. and Schmid, R.F. 2011. ‘What forty years of research says about the impact of technology on learning: A second-order meta-analysis and validation study. Review of Educational Research. 81 (1).
• Tileston, D.W. 2003. What Every Teacher Should Know about Media and Technology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
• Turel, Y.K. and Johnson, T.E. 2012. ‘Teachers’ belief and use of interactive whiteboards for teaching and learning.’ Educational Technology and Society . 15(1).
• Volman, M., van Eck, E., Heemskerk, I. and Kuiper, E. 2005. ‘New technologies, new differences. Gender and ethnic differences in pupils’ use of ICT in primary and secondary education.’ Computers and Education. 45 .
• Voogt, J., Knezek, G., Cox, M., Knezek, D. and ten Brummelhuis, A. 2013. ‘Under which conditions does ICT have a positive effect on teaching and learning? A call to action.’ Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 29 (1).
• Warschauer, M. and Ames, M. 2010. ‘Can one laptop per child save the world’s poor?’ Journal of International Affairs. 64 (1).
• Zuker, A.A. and Light, D. 2009. ‘Laptop programs for students.’ Science. 323 (5910).

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First AI + Education Summit is an international push for “AI fluency”

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This summer, 350 participants came to MIT to dive into a question that is, so far, outpacing answers: How can education still create opportunities for all when digital literacy is no longer enough — a world in which students now need to have AI fluency?

The  AI + Education Summit was hosted by the  MIT RAISE Initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, the Mayor’s Office of the City of Boston, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and more. Highlights included an onsite “Hack the Climate” hackathon, where teams of beginner and experienced MIT App Inventor users had a single day to develop an app for fighting climate change.

In opening remarks , RAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal emphasized what new goals for AI fluency look like. “Education is not just about learning facts,” Klopfer said. “Education is a whole developmental process. And we need to think about how we support teachers in being more effective. Teachers must be part of the AI conversation.” Abelson highlighted the empowerment aspect of computational action, namely its immediate impact, that “what’s different than in the decades of people teaching about computers [is] what kids can do right now.” And Breazeal, director of the RAISE Initiative, touched upon AI-supported learning, including the imperative to use technology like classroom robot companions as something supplementary to what students and teachers can do together, not as a replacement for one another. Or as  Breazeal underlined in her talk : “We really want people to understand, in an appropriate way, how AI works and how to design it responsibly. We want to make sure that people have an informed voice of how AI should be integrated into society. And we want to empower all kinds of people around the world to be able to use AI, harness AI, to solve the important problems of their communities.”

The summit featured the invited winners of the  Global AI Hackathon . Prizes were awarded for apps in two tracks: climate and sustainability, and health and wellness. Winning projects addressed issues like  sign-language-to-audio translation , moving object detection for the vision impaired, empathy practice using interactions with AI characters, and personal health checks using tongue images. Attendees also participated in hands-on demos for MIT App Inventor, a “playground” for the  Personal Robots Group ’s social robots, and an educator professional development session on responsible AI.

By convening people of so many ages, professional backgrounds, and geographies, organizers were able to foreground a unique mix of ideas for participants to take back home. Conference papers included real-world case studies of implementing AI in school settings, such as extracurricular clubs, considerations for student data security, and large-scale experiments in the United Arab Emirates and India. And plenary speakers tackled  funding AI in education , state government’s role in supporting its adoption, and — in the  summit’s keynote speech by Microsoft’s principal director of AI and machine learning engineering Francesca Lazzeri — the opportunities and challenges of the use of generative AI in education. Lazzeri discussed the development of tool kits that enact safeguards around principles like fairness, security, and transparency. “I truly believe that learning generative AI is not just about computer science students,” Lazzeri said. “It’s about all of us.”

Trailblazing AI education from MIT

Critical to early AI education has been the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a longtime collaborator that helped MIT deploy  computational action and project-based learning years before AI was even a widespread pedagogical challenge. A summit panel discussed the history of its CoolThink project , which brought such learning to grades 4-6 in 32 Hong Kong schools in an initial pilot and then met the ambitious goal of bringing it to over 200 Hong Kong schools. On the panel, CoolThink director Daniel Lai said that the trust, MIT, Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong did not want to add a burden to teachers and students of another curriculum outside of school. Instead, they wanted “to mainstream it into our educational system so that every child would have equal opportunity to access these skills and knowledge.”

MIT worked as a collaborator from CoolThink’s start in 2016. Professor and App Inventor founder Hal Abelson helped Lai get the project off the ground. Several summit attendees and former MIT research staff members were leaders in the project development. Educational technologist Josh Sheldon directed the MIT team’s work on the CoolThink curriculum and teacher professional development. Karen Lang, then App Inventor’s education and business development manager, was the main curriculum developer for the initial phase of CoolThink, writing the lessons and accompanying tutorials and worksheets for the three levels in the curriculum, with editing assistance from the Hong Kong education team. And Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led the development of the project’s research design and theoretical grounding. Among other key tasks, they ran the initial teacher training for the first two cohorts of Hong Kong teachers, consisting of sessions totaling 40 hours with about 40 teachers each.

The ethical demands of today’s AI “funhouse mirror”

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing,  delivered the closing keynote . He described the current state of AI as a “funhouse mirror” that “distorts the world around us” and framed it as yet another technology that has presented humans with ethical demands to find its positive, empowering uses that complement our intelligence but also to mitigate its risks. 

“One of the areas I’m most excited about personally,” Huttenlocher said, “is people learning from AI,” with AI discovering solutions that people had not yet come upon on their own. As so much of the summit demonstrated, AI and education is something that must happen in collaboration. “[AI] is not human intellect. This is not human judgment. This is something different.”

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5 Essential Tech Talks to Have With Students

To set the stage for successful student use of technology, start the year by discussing expectations around how tech like AI should and shouldn’t be used in your classroom.

In many K–12 classrooms, the combination of one-to-one devices and internet connectivity allows teachers to provide students with “access to knowledge, communities, and opportunities that they would never have been able to reach before,” associate professor Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and science teacher Tess Bernhard note.

That access—via tools like email and video conferencing, web browsers, and apps that can unleash students’ creativity—can become overwhelming, like turbulent white water rapids, or, if managed wisely, feel more like a tranquilly flowing stream. What determines the flow is the guidelines and guardrails you set up, explains educational consultant Jamie Knowles.

Clearly defined policies, routines, and expectations can “help students use class time most efficiently” while helping you get the most out of teaching with technology, Knowles says. Having conversations to lay out your policies can also provide space to co-create norms alongside students, which can increase their engagement . Enlist their voices where possible and students are much more likely to take “ownership over the way the class is run and its daily culture.”

Here are some suggestions for how to have these conversations with students at the start of the year.

The AI Playbook

AI is one of several big challenges educators face. Many teachers are learning about this evolving technology alongside their students without a lot of definitive resources , professional development , or training . An informal poll of 1,935 educators conducted by high school teacher Chanea Bond on X (formerly Twitter) revealed that 79 percent felt they didn’t know enough about AI to “teach students how to use it responsibly in a classroom setting as a professional responsibility.” But that’s exactly what a lot of teachers are being asked to do.

Whether you allow or prohibit the use of AI, students should know what to expect. “Students need to understand the rationale for these kinds of decisions as part of their own emerging AI literacy ,” science teacher Jen Stauffer and middle school history teacher Jonathan Gold write. AI adds another layer to conversations around integrity and “what good work looks like inside the classroom,” Gold told me in a recent interview. It’s helpful to add AI to topics you already go over, like documenting your sources or resource research .

Gold doesn’t spend much time talking about student use of AI initially: “AI tools are a second semester tool,” he tells students, focusing at first on norms of trust, reliability, and the classroom’s intellectual culture. These need to precede the introduction of AI, he says: “You don’t get in the car on the first day of Driver’s Ed.” Gold tells students AI is something they will eventually experiment with and advises them not to use the tools just yet. When you’re ready to introduce AI, a simple “ red light, yellow light, green light ” system can help guide student usage.

Bond uses a different approach in her English classes—“AI generated or enhanced writing is not permitted,” she says, and she takes time to explain why . Bond’s policy, the starting point for her class discussion, is one that other teachers can use: “In this class, your job is to grow into a better reader and writer. In order to do your job, you must read and write a lot. My job is to provide feedback to help you grow in your abilities. In order to do my job, I need to read YOUR writing. I need to know YOUR voice.”

Phones or No Phones?

The earlier you set up cell phone expectations , the better, writes Liz Kolb, a clinical professor of education technologies and teacher education at the University of Michigan. Especially in schools without access to one-to-one devices, smartphones remain a tool that teachers can use to benefit learning—but they need clear policies to avoid the ever-present possibility that the devices will be distracting.

In classrooms where students can use their phones for independent work or research , educator Sarah Said suggests communicating the “boundary for when phones can and can’t be out.” A stoplight management approach “allows teachers some flexibility to use cell phones when the situation warrants,” Kolb explains: Posting a red button on the door tells students that devices will not be used that day. Have a conversation to engage students in thinking critically about the cell phone’s role in the classroom: “Ask your students to help you develop social norms for what is and is not appropriate cell phone use during green and yellow button times,” she says. “Should they be allowed to go on their social media networks during class? Why or why not? Talk to them about what to do with their devices in different social scenarios in the classroom.”

In some districts, students may have had a rude awakening if their school or district established a policy banning cell phones . Staff development teacher Christopher Klein advises “treating students with empathy and providing respectful, humane solutions ” as you navigate this transition together. At Luxemburg-Casco Middle School, teachers began the year with a review of the school’s “ away for the day ” policy, which has students keep their phones in their lockers from the first bell of the day to the last. In other schools, cell phones and smartwatches are to be turned off and kept in Yondr pouches, students’ backpacks, or hanging phone caddies during class; once again, this needs to be consistently communicated to students.

Klein suggests elevating these discussions of classroom norms with reflection: “Each September I show my students a video like this one to spark thinking about their relationships with their cell phones, survey students about their technology use, and provide self-help strategies for when students recognize the need to limit the amount of time they are spending on their phones.”

Guiding Students to a Richer Understanding of Tech

Children “have many opportunities to interact with new technologies” but rarely get to create with them , writes Mitchel Resnick, a computer scientist and LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab. That’s because computers are viewed by people of all ages as “information machines,” whereas Resnick argues they should be seen as more like paintbrushes. 

Discuss with students how they can use technology to engage with curricular content on a deeper level and to show what they know . Let them know that using technology creatively to demonstrate their understanding is not only accepted, but embraced. This gives kids license to explore active uses of technology and motivation to think outside the box. In Amy Szczepanski’s ninth- and 10th-grade science classes, students choose their own final —from the topic to how they will demonstrate their knowledge. One student used the popular sandbox video game Minecraft to make a model of DNA, a callback to an earlier assignment where he had used the game to build a model of a cell and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. 

Similarly, occasionally allowing students to craft podcasts or video essays analyzing a concept or topic has a lot of overlap with the process of writing an essay , says Tanner Higgin, a senior researcher at WestEd. Such assignments provide a chance to discuss not just the creative possibilities of technology but also what makes a piece of writing effective or powerful.

Tending to Your Tech

When the bell rings, many older students get up and walk out of the classroom almost without thinking, Hedreich Nichols, a district educational technology integration specialist, told me: “That’s where we lose so many devices and things get broken.” This can often lead to computers becoming “beyond use six months into the school year.” 

Explaining your expectations can prevent a lot of problems, Nichols says. “You have to tell kids how to hold their laptop if they’re walking with it,” she explains. “Tell kids how to make sure it’s cleaned and wiped down each day, or if you do it once every three days. You build routines around what to do and not do.” Curriculum Principal David LaMaster loops families into that conversation. Each Sunday, he sends a nudge via school social media accounts and the learning management system to remind middle-grade students to bring their devices—fully charged—to school: “Parents and students frequently tell me how much they appreciate the reminders,” he writes. 

Students can be very hard on devices, and to mitigate wear and tear, Nichols suggests dedicating the first and last couple minutes of class to having students check their devices over . “Just as no one would require a science teacher to start and end lab instruction without proper setup, breakdown, and cleanup as a part of the instructional block, similar protocols are vital for teachers who now essentially provide daily instruction in computer labs,” Nichols says. 

Digital Citizenship 101

While Digital Citizenship Week is celebrated in October, the first few weeks of school are a great time to set some ground rules around smart online behavior and digital decorum , notes teacher and edtech consultant Rachelle Dené Poth. It’s particularly important as technologies like AI gain traction, she says—students should be careful not to enter personally identifiable information or simply accept an output from generative AI as objective fact. 

Poth suggests that teachers at least emphasize that students should think before they post on social media, explain what is and isn’t appropriate to share in online spaces and why, and model how to properly cite and use information that they access through the internet. Broader conversations should show students “the impact of one’s digital actions,” she says, including how to keep themselves safe online, protect their privacy and respect the privacy of others, think critically about and analyze information they encounter , and engage respectfully with both people they know and those they don’t. 

Poth has students “create PSAs to share information about one of the elements of digital citizenship they selected” to display in the hallways. Pam Fierst, an eighth-grade ELA teacher, discusses the potential issues and dangers of cell phones with students. What these exercises have in common is that they guide students to discuss responsible and irresponsible practices when using the internet and their devices. They are also a great way to remind students of general guidelines that they sometimes forget or ignore, like the fact that playing games on school-assigned devices is prohibited without permission, or that harassing or cyberbullying a peer has consequences.

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Chapter 6: Understanding technology in education

6.2 A short history of educational technology

Arguments about the role of technology in education go back at least 2,500 years.  To understand better the role and influence of technology on teaching, we need a little history, because as always there are lessons to be learned from history. Paul Saettler’s ‘ The E volution of American E ducational T echnology ‘ (1990) is one of the most extensive historical accounts, but only goes up to 1989. A lot has happened since then. Teemu Leinonen also has a good blog post on the more recent history (for a more detailed account see Leitonen, 2010). See also: The Evolution of Learning Technologies .

What I’m giving you here is the postage stamp version of ed tech history, and a personal one at that.

6.2.1 Oral communication

One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral – though human speech – although over time, technology has been increasingly used to facilitate or ‘back-up’ oral communication. In ancient times, stories, folklore, histories and news were transmitted and maintained through oral communication, making accurate memorization a critical skill, and the oral tradition is still the case in many aboriginal cultures. For the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means by which people learned and passed on learning. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were recitative poems, intended for public performance. To be learned, they had to be memorized by listening, not by reading, and transmitted by recitation, not by writing.

Nevertheless, by the fifth century B.C, written documents existed in considerable numbers in ancient Greece. If we believe Socrates, education has been on a downward spiral ever since. According to Plato, Socrates caught one of his students (Phaedrus) pretending to recite a speech from memory that in fact he had learned from a written version. Socrates then told Phaedrus the story of how the god Theuth offered the King of Egypt the gift of writing, which would be a ‘recipe for both memory and wisdom’. The king was not impressed. According to the king,

 it [writing] will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on what is written, creating memory not from within themselves, but by means of external symbols. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow men.

Phaedrus, 274c-275, translation adapted from Manguel, 1996

I can just hear some of my former colleagues saying the same thing about social media.

Slate boards were in use in India in the 12th century AD, and blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn of the 18th century. At the end of World War Two the U.S. Army started using overhead projectors for training, and their use became common for lecturing, until being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational software such as Powerpoint around 1990. This may be the place to point out that most technologies used in education were not developed specifically for education but for other purposes (mainly for the military or business.)

Although the telephone dates from the late 1870s, the standard telephone system never became a major educational tool, not even in distance education, because of the high cost of analogue telephone calls for multiple users, although audio-conferencing has been used to supplement other media since the 1970s.  Video-conferencing using dedicated cable systems and dedicated conferencing rooms have been in use since the 1980s. The development of video compression technology and relatively low cost video servers in the early 2000s led to the introduction of lecture capture systems for recording and streaming classroom lectures in 2008. Webinars now are used largely for delivering lectures over the Internet.

None of these technologies though changes the oral basis of communication for teaching.

6.2.2 Written communication

The role of text or writing in education also has a long history. According to the Bible, Moses used chiseled stone to convey the ten commandments in a form of writing, probably around the 7th century BC. Even though Socrates is reported to have railed against the use of writing, written forms of communication make analytic, lengthy chains of reasoning and argument much more accessible, reproducible without distortion, and thus more open to analysis and critique than the transient nature of speech. The invention of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century was a truly disruptive technology, making written knowledge much more freely available, very much in the same way as the Internet has done today. As a result of the explosion of written documents resulting from the mechanization of printing, many more people in government and business were required to become literate and analytical, which led to a rapid expansion of formal education in Europe. There were many reasons for the development of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the triumph of reason and science over superstition and beliefs in Europe, but the technology of printing was a key agent of change.

Improvements in transport infrastructure in the 19th century, and in particular the creation of a cheap and reliable postal system in the 1840s, led to the development of the first formal correspondence education, with the University of London offering an external degree program by correspondence from 1858. This first formal distance degree program still exists today in the form of the University of London International Program. In the 1970s, the Open University transformed the use of print for teaching through specially designed, highly illustrated printed course units that integrated learning activities with the print medium, based on advanced instructional design.

With the development of web-based learning management systems in the mid-1990s, textual communication, although digitized, became, at least for a brief time, the main communication medium for Internet-based learning, although lecture capture is now changing that.

6.2.3 Broadcasting and video

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting educational radio programs for schools in the 1920s. The first adult education radio broadcast from the BBC in 1924 was a talk on Insects in Relation to Man, and in the same year, J.C. Stobart, the new Director of Education at the BBC, mused about ‘a broadcasting university’ in the journal Radio Times (Robinson, 1982).   Television was first used in education in the 1960s, for schools and for general adult education (one of the six purposes in the current BBC’s Royal Charter is still ‘promoting education and learning’).

In 1969, the British government established the Open University (OU), which worked in partnership with the BBC to develop university programs open to all, using a combination originally of printed materials specially designed by OU staff, and television and radio programs made by the BBC but integrated with the courses. Although the radio programs involved mainly oral communication, the television programs did not use lectures as such, but focused more on the common formats of general television, such as documentaries, demonstration of processes, and cases/case studies (see Bates, 1985). In other words, the BBC focused on the unique ‘affordances’ of television, a topic that will be discussed in much more detail later. Over time, as new technologies such as audio- and video-cassettes were introduced, live broadcasting, especially radio, was cut back for OU programs, although there are still some general educational channels broadcasting around the world (e.g. TVOntario in Canada; PBS, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel in the USA).

The use of television for education quickly spread around the world, being seen in the 1970s by some, particularly in international agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO, as a panacea for education in developing countries, the hopes for which quickly faded when the realities of lack of electricity, cost, security of publicly available equipment, climate, resistance from local  teachers, and local language and cultural issues became apparent (see, for instance, Jamison and Klees, 1973). Satellite broadcasting started to become available in the 1980s, and similar hopes were expressed of delivering ‘university lectures from the world’s leading universities to the world’s starving masses’, but these hopes too quickly faded for similar reasons. However, India, which had launched its own satellite, INSAT, in 1983, used it initially for delivering locally produced educational television programs throughout the country, in several indigenous languages, using Indian-designed receivers and television sets in local community centres as well as schools (Bates, 1985). India is still using satellites for tele-education into the poorest parts of the country at the time of writing (2015).

In the 1990s the cost of creating and distributing video dropped dramatically due to digital compression and high-speed Internet access.  This reduction in the costs of recording and distributing video also led to the development of lecture capture systems. The technology allows students to view or review lectures at any time and place with an Internet connection. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started making its recorded lectures available to the public, free of charge, via its OpenCourseWare project, in 2002.  YouTube started in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006. YouTube is increasingly being used for short educational clips that can be downloaded and integrated into online courses. The Khan Academy started using YouTube in 2006 for recorded voice-over lectures using a digital blackboard for equations and illustrations. Apple Inc. in 2007 created iTunesU to became a portal or a site where videos and other digital materials on university teaching could be collected and downloaded free of charge by end users.

Until lecture capture arrived, learning management systems had integrated basic educational design features, but this required instructors to redesign their classroom-based teaching to fit the LMS environment. Lecture capture on the other hand required no changes to the standard lecture model, and in a sense reverted back to primarily oral communication supported by Powerpoint or even writing on a chalkboard. Thus oral communication remains as strong today in education as ever, but has been incorporated into or accommodated by new technologies.

6.2.4 Computer technologies

6.2.4.1 computer-based learning.

In essence the development of programmed learning aims to computerize teaching, by structuring information, testing learners’ knowledge, and providing immediate feedback to learners, without human intervention other than in the design of the hardware and software and the selection and loading of content and assessment questions. B.F. Skinner started experimenting with teaching machines that made use of programmed learning in 1954, based on the theory of behaviourism (see Chapter 2, Section 3 ). Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based learning. There has been a recent revival of programmed learning approaches as a result of MOOCs, since machine based testing scales much more easily than human-based assessment.

PLATO was a generalized computer assisted instruction system originally developed at the University of Illinois, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. PLATO was a highly successful system, lasting almost 40 years, and incorporated key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.

Attempts to replicate the teaching process through artificial intelligence (AI) began in the mid-1980s, with a focus initially on teaching arithmetic. Despite large investments of research in AI for teaching over the last 30 years, the results generally have been disappointing. It has proved difficult for machines to cope with the extraordinary variety of ways in which students learn (or fail to learn.) Recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience are being watched closely but at the time of writing the gap is still great between the basic science, and analysing or predicting specific learning behaviours from the science.

More recently we have seen the development of adaptive learning, which analyses learners’ responses then re-directs them to the most appropriate content area, based on their performance. Learning analytics, which also collects data about learner activities and relates them to other data, such as student performance, is a related development. These developments will be discussed in further detail in Section 6.7.

6.2.4.2 Computer networking

Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol in 1982. In the late 1970s, Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz at the New Jersey Institute of Technology were experimenting with blended learning, using NJIT’s internal computer network. They combined classroom teaching with online discussion forums, and termed this ‘computer-mediated communication’ or CMC (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). At the University of Guelph in Canada, an off-the-shelf software system called CoSy was developed in the 1980s that allowed for online threaded group discussion forums, a predecessor to today’s forums contained in learning management systems. In 1988, the Open University in the United Kingdom offered a course, DT200, that as well as the OU’s traditional media of printed texts, television programs and audio-cassettes, also included an online discussion component using CoSy. Since this course had 1,200 registered students, it was one of the earliest ‘mass’ open online courses. We see then the emerging division between the use of computers for automated or programmed learning, and the use of computer networks to enable students and instructors to communicate with each other.

The Word Wide Web was formally launched in 1991. The World Wide Web is basically an application running on the Internet that enables ‘end-users’ to create and link documents, videos or other digital media, without the need for the end-user to transcribe everything into some form of computer code. The first web browser, Mosaic, was made available in 1993. Before the Web, it required lengthy and time-consuming methods to load text, and to find material on the Internet. Several Internet search engines have been developed since 1993, with Google, created in 1999, emerging as one of the primary search engines.

6.2.4.3 Online learning environments

In 1995, the Web enabled the development of the first learning management systems (LMSs), such as WebCT (which later became Blackboard). LMSs provide an online teaching environment, where content can be loaded and organized, as well as providing ‘spaces’ for learning objectives, student activities, assignment questions, and discussion forums. The first fully online courses (for credit) started to appear in 1995, some using LMSs, others just loading text as PDFs or slides. The materials were mainly text and graphics. LMSs became the main means by which online learning was offered until  lecture capture systems arrived  around 2008.

By 2008, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in Canada were using web technology to create the first ‘connectivist’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a community of practice that linked webinar presentations and/or blog posts by experts to participants’ blogs and tweets, with just over 2,000 enrollments. The courses were open to anyone and had no formal assessment. In 2012, two Stanford University professors launched a lecture-capture based MOOC on artificial intelligence, attracting more than 100,000 students, and since then MOOCs have expanded rapidly around the world.

6.2.5 Social media

Social media are really a sub-category of computer technology, but their development deserves a section of its own in the history of educational technology. Social media cover a wide range of different technologies, including blogs, wikis, You Tube videos, mobile devices such as phones and tablets, Twitter, Skype and Facebook. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein (2010) define social media as

a group of Internet-based applications that …allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content, based on interactions among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.

Social media are strongly associated with young people and ‘millenials’ – in other words, many of the students in post-secondary education. At the time of writing social media are only just being integrated into formal education, and to date their main educational value has been in non-formal education, such as fostering online communities of practice, or around the edges of classroom teaching, such as ‘tweets’ during lectures or rating of instructors. It will be argued though in Chapters 8, 9 and 10 that they have much greater potential for learning.

6.2.6 A paradigm shift

It can be seen that education has adopted and adapted technology over a long period of time. There are some useful lessons to be learned from past developments in the use of technology for education, in particular that many claims made for a newly emerging technology are likely to be neither true nor new. Also new technology rarely completely replaces an older technology. Usually the old technology remains, operating within a more specialised ‘niche’, such as radio, or integrated as part of a richer technology environment, such as video in the Internet.

However, what distinguishes the digital age from all previous ages is the rapid pace of technology development and our immersion in technology-based activities in our daily lives. Thus it is fair to describe the impact of the Internet on education as a paradigm shift, at least in terms of educational technology. We are still in the process of absorbing and applying the implications. The next section attempts to pin down more closely the educational significance of different media and technologies.

Activity 6.2 What does history tell us?

1. What constitutes an educational technology? How would you classify a recorded lecture from MIT that is accessed as an open educational resource? When is a technology educational and not just a technology?

2. An early version  of the Internet (Arpanet) existed long before 1990, but the combination of Internet protocols and the development of html and the World Wide Web were clearly a turning point in both telecommunications and education (at least for me). What then makes the Internet/the Web a paradigm shift? Or are they just an evolution, an orderly next step in the development of technology?

3. Is writing a technology? Is a lecture a technology? Does it matter to decide this?

4. The more sharp eyed or analytical of you may be asking questions about the categorization or definition of some of the technologies listed above (quite apart from the issue of how to deal with people as a means of communication). For instance computer-mediated communication (CMC) existed before the Internet (from 1978 in fact), but isn’t it an Internet technology? (It is now, but wasn’t then.) How do social media differ from CMC? Does it make sense to distinguish television technologies such as broadcast, cable, satellite, DVDs or video-conferencing, and is this relevant any more? If so, what distinguishes them and what do they have in common from an educational perspective?

These are some of the issues that will become clearer in the following sections.

 References

Bates, A. (1985)  Broadcasting in Education: An Evaluation  London: Constables

Hiltz, R. and Turoff, M. (1978) The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer Reading MA: Addison-Wesley

Jamison, D. and Klees, S. (1973) The Cost of Instructional Radio and Television for Developing Countries Stanford CA: Stanford University Institute for Communication Research

Kaplan, A. and Haenlein, M. (2010), Users of the world, unite! The  challenges and opportunities of social media, Business Horizons, Vol.  53, No. 1 , pp. 59-68

Leitonen, T. (2010) Designing Learning Tools: Methodological Insights Aalto, Finland: Aalto  University School of Art and Design

Manguel, A. (1996) A History of Reading London: Harper Collins

Robinson, J. (1982) Broadcasting Over the Air London: BBC

Saettler, P. (1990) The Evolution of American Educational Technology Englewood CO: Libraries Unlimited

Selwood, D. (2014)  What does the Rosetta Stone tell us about the Bible? Did Moses read hieroglyphs? The Telegraph , July 15

Teaching in a Digital Age Copyright © 2015 by Anthony William (Tony) Bates is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Tech in the Classroom: What Is It Good For?

Our expert presents a new way to think about the question.

Tech has been part of education for a long time, particularly during the pandemic, when lots of instruction went remote. Questions, though, still arise about whether tech-enhanced learning promotes or stymies the ability to think and relate to others in the workforce. 

4 Benefits of Tech in Education

• It supports students with diverse needs.
• Tools like virtual reality help students learn faster.
• Tech can build efficient individualized learning programs.
• Tech tools can encourage students to collaborate.

There are definitely those who support technology and those who do not, which leaves educators in particular conflicted on whether to use technology in the classroom. 

Related Reading What Are Children Learning When They Learn to Code?

Tech in the Classroom: Positives and Negatives

On one hand, analog-heavy environments bestow some benefits on students. Students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand, according to one series of studies . Another paper showed that using AI in the classroom hampered students’ ability to think critically . 

Still, these benefits come with a few asterisks. Gains are most pronounced for gifted students, suggesting that the majority of people perform worse in areas of memory and thinking when they use technology. Studies confirm what we’ve suspected all along — that reduced social skills are linked to increased screen time. 

On the other hand, a tech-augmented environment also helps students. For instance, virtual reality-based learning outperforms traditional methods, according to one inquiry . Technology in the classroom has the capacity to better support individualized learning, students with special needs and elicit more active participation from all students.

Technology also boosts student engagement because it shifts the classroom dynamics, allowing students to take more agency and responsibility in their learning. When used properly, technology and internet use helps students explore solutions to real-world problems.

Because there are clear drawbacks and benefits to tech use in classrooms, my view is that the discussion should be about how and when to use technological tools in learning environments, not whether it should be in the classroom at all.  

Careers: A Great Use for Tech in the Classroom

Because technology is a helpful tool in our modern society and the demand for tech careers continues to rise, one solution is to align the use of tech with a broader workforce development approach. 

In classrooms, educators should lead students in applying tech tools to projects that align with their interests and skills, while being sure to integrate social skills, decision making, emotional intelligence and collaboration.

For example, highly detailed jobs involving numbers are greatly enhanced by technology, but require both reasoning and interpersonal communication for success. Accountants, research analysts, financial analysts, auditors, civil engineers, economists and data scientists use technology to perform their job duties. 

However, all these professionals also engage in inferential activities and cannot rely solely on technology to succeed. Each of these jobs require interaction with diverse people as well as collaborative and complex decision-making skills. Children/students with such interests should be given opportunities to engage in diverse approaches to logical/mathematical problem solving , with opportunities to explain their conclusions.

Related Reading The Future of Education Technology

Balancing Digital and Analog Learning Tools

The final question is: what strategies are most effective in balancing the use of tech and analog methods? When using technological methods, educators should frame learning activities in ways that require teamwork and facilitate participation . Under these circumstances, student autonomy, competence, connection to others and engagement i ncreased .

Moreover, educators should help students/children understand the conditions under which technology is most helpful. One example is offering lesson plans where students identify a problem that can be solved with technology. 

Another opportunity for blending technology and analog activities is through linking activities to student daily experiences, as well as offering opportunities for students to develop and create their own apps .

In conclusion, the use of technology may be too ingrained in our society to view it through an either-or lens. The greater question may be, “How do we adapt?” Rather than forcing skills from the past onto all students, we may have greater success if we spend more time assessing the specific conditions under which analogy and technology skills are best used. 

The next step may likely be investing in more training for integrating technology into classrooms while continuing to innovate curriculum that incorporates technology, hands-on skills, group-based collaboration and project-based learning.

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Global Education Monitoring Report

Launch of the 2024 Youth Report on technology in education: A tool on our terms!

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Registration

In-person participation: Room I, UNESCO’s Headquarters in Paris (register here )  

Online participation: Webcast in French and English

High-level launch event during Digital Learning Week

The 2024  GEMYouth Report will be launched on 5 September 2024 during Digital Learning Week at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris during an event bringing together young from different regions to discuss leveraging technology from learning.

14:30-14:35 | Setting the scene  

• Primrose Manyalo (Zimbabwe), Senior Youth Collective Manager, Restless Development  

 14:35- 14:45 | Keynote speech  

• Rémy Buisine (France) , Journalist BRUT   

14:45-14:47 | Youth voices matter (video message)  

• Felipe Paullier (Uruguay), UN Assistant Secretary General for Youth Affairs  

14:47-15:00 | Launch of the 2024 Youth Report on technology in education: A tool on our terms! 

• Manos Antoninis (Greece), Director, Global Education Monitoring Report, UNESCO    

15:00-15:05 | Video: A call to action for tech on our terms

Video with youth voices involved in the GEM Report consultation process  

15:05-15:50 |   Youth dialogues: placing youth at the centre of the discussions around the use of technology in education   

• Ms Brianna Lee (Canada), Youth advocate on ethical AI   
• Mr Ayuen Deng Buk (South Sudan), Youth advocate on education for refugees  
• Ms Najd Alfadl (Saudi Arabia), SDG 4 Youth and Student Network   
• Ms Léa Roubinet (France), European Youth Envoy for ITU Generation Connect programme  

15:50-16:00 | Closing: towards a call to action for a tool on our terms!    

• Jacob Blasius (Denmark), Executive Director, Global Student Forum  

Watch the launch event

About the 2024 GEM Youth Report

The 2024 GEM Youth Report on technology in education: A tool on our terms! is the result of an extensive consultation process in partnerhip with Restless Development involving +1500 youth and students across 8 regions. The consultations invited participants to reflect on the key challenges and opportunities for the use of technology in education in their regions through the lenses of two out of the four recommendations of the global Global Education Monitoring Report on technology in education: Technology on our terms. The discussions centred on the need for the use of technology in education to be appropriate for national and local contexts and to be equitable and leave no one behind.   

The report calls for decisions about technology in education to prioritize learner needs after an assessment of whether its application would be appropriate, equitable, evidence-based, and sustainable and provides a compass to use for youth and students from around the world when using technology in education.   

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7 inspiring ted talks on education and technology.

In today’s classrooms, we are trying to integrate technology, creativity, and learning. It may seem impossible for smaller, or lower budget schools to incorporate these elements in the classroom. It may even be challenging for larger schools to combine the right resources for student education. But, educators are finding ways to connect students with technology in surprising ways.

Education and Technology

We have 7 Ted Talks to inspire innovation in education and technology. From using tools like computers and games to inspiring creativity by asking questions, these videos will inspire us to change our thinking on education and technology. Let us know which video inspires you the most in the comments below!

1| Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson makes an interesting argument about creativity and education. As the most watched TedTalk at over 48 million views, he states that the current classroom needs to incorporate education with creativity and technology. In between his witty banter and funny comments, the message of challenging school systems to nurture creativity in students comes forth as the most important topic

2| How Art, Technology, and Design Inform Creative Leaders

John Maeda is an artist, designer, and former president of the Rhode Island School of Design. He dedicated his life’s work to linking design and technology. His Ted Talk speech from June of 2012 brings about three crucial aspects in a hands-on approach to education– technology, design, art, and leadership. Maeda argues how education and technology are connecting people physically and digitally. He shows how each element has a correlating concept by making possibilities, solutions, questions, and actions.

3| A Delightful Way to Teach Kids about Computers

We are coders! Our kids and students are coders and programmers, and they don’t need a computer to be so. Linda Liukas shows us how our daily hobbies like knitting, playing guitar, conjugating French irregular verbs, and more can make you a programmer. Liukas’ short Ted Talk emphasis the need to provide children tools to build with computers.

4| How Games Make Kids Smarter

You can say Gabe Zichermann is a gamer. As an entrepreneur and author, Zichermann shows how games are making kids better problem-solvers, multi-taskers, and helps them retain concepts. He is the pioneer of Gamification. We don’t think it’s the end of reading books with a cup of tea on a Saturday morning, but video games are the future building blocks for student education.

5| 12 Year Old App Developer

Wise beyond his twelve years, this young man is a leader and innovator. Thomas Suzrez made two apps. His app Bustin Jieber became a success. Thomas wants to help other students by creating a place to share knowledge by encouraging the involvement of teachers, family, and mentors.

6| Let’s Teach Kids to Code

“Learning in meaningful context.” That’s what computer scientist, Mitch Resnick sees as a result of teaching kids to code. Resnick explains that kids learning to code gain important concepts that can be used in a real-world application. The process of design, practicing creativity, and using relevant skills to learn code prepares students for the changing world of technology.

7| The Call to Learn

Clifford Stoll is captivating in his TED talk about learning. He is an astronomer, educator, and skeptic of technology. Including his TED talk speech may be hypocritical, for his skepticism of technology in the classroom. However, his message of learning can be linked hand in hand with asking questions and using technology to find answers.

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The Benefits of Speech-to-Text Technology in All Classrooms

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During in-person instruction, Vikram Nahal would correct console grips in his role as a Resource Specialist Program (RSP) teacher in Northern California. Learning console grips helps students develop the hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills necessary to correctly form shapes on a page. He could provide grip tools for pencils or guide students’ hands with his own, familiarizing them with the strokes. 

During virtual education, he relied on reference materials and parent assistance when available. An adult in the room could help demonstrate grips, steer hands and inform Nahal when additional resources were needed.

Despite the difficulties of offering support remotely, Nahal found that virtual learning allowed him to experiment with new technologies that supported his students with learning disabilities. Speech-to-text technology allowed them to more easily transfer their ideas onto the page. This especially helped his students with ADHD and processing-related disabilities, such as auditory processing disorder or working memory deficits.

Speech-to-text tools also saved time, which is helpful for students who might forget their ideas once they try to write or students who struggle with getting any words on the page at all, feeling unable to transfer their thoughts. For some, this was because of the intimidation of writing academically, with spelling and grammar anxieties prohibiting them from starting. For others, the time taken to write out initial thoughts caused them to forget later conclusions and analyses, given the lack of immediacy in writing.

“Coming into the distance learning, I was really worried about these kids. But what I found was through using the speech-to-text feature, they were able to get their ideas on paper. They didn’t have that physical transfer where they had to go and write it out and lose what they were thinking about in the process. And they really evolved as writers,” said Nahal.

The process of vocalizing their ideas and watching their words simultaneously appear on the screen relieved much of the stress around writing. Students could watch their thoughts fill a page, proving for some that they were capable of doing so. They could then go through and revise their grammar and ideas, correcting anywhere the technology misheard them and getting practice editing their own writing.

The initial skill required of students wasn’t spelling or grammar, but the ability to transfer their ideas to the page. Natalie Conway is a teacher who works with students with disabilities in grades Kindergarten through 3rd at a statewide online charter school in Oregon. She has been teaching online for seven years. She said that specifically identifying which standard is being assessed, and providing accommodations for the standards not presently up to bat, can help make school more accessible for all students.

“Those accommodations are going to benefit kids who are unidentified (in disability) and who just would enjoy learning that way,” said Conway. “So if you make it available to everyone, it’s not stigmatizing to anyone. And students are going to self-select what’s going to work for them. They know themselves, too, especially the older they get.”

Writing is Rewriting

Nahal eventually transitioned his students off speech-to-text, encouraging them to write phonetically in a subsequent phase but with the same initial indifference to spelling and grammar encouraged by a first draft from speech-to-text. Then, once the ideas were on the page, Nahal and his students could comb through their work, updating spelling and modifying their language to meet academic conventions. 

“Through the process of correcting their work and typing, they’ve become better writers,” he said.

He spotlighted spell check as a simple way students could see that they misspelled words, with the automatic underline quickly notifying students of a mistake. That helped make editing for spelling and grammar less difficult online. Speech-to-text technology accelerated his students’ writing skills during virtual learning. 

“These gains would have not happened had we been in person. I mean, it would have happened, but not so rapidly in my estimation,” Nahal said.

Voice Practice 

Conway spotlighted speech-to-text technology as liberating for kids with writing disabilities and fine motor needs. Beyond writing homework assignments, the technology can also be used for quick in-class responses. If a teacher asks all students to put an answer in the virtual class’ chatbox, for instance, a student who might not feel confident in their ability to write their thoughts can use transcription software to still participate. And for chat boxes with microphone transcription enabled, they can participate even more quickly. 

“It’s giving students independence, instead of having to have a scribe all the time or having to have someone read to them all the time,” said Kathleen Kane Parkinson, a diverse learner teacher in Chicago. 

In the past, many students would only be able to practice their pronunciations in a classroom setting. Now, this technology and related technologies allow for pronunciation practice to be incorporated into at-home work. Some teachers, like Parkinson, may choose to continue using some form of voice-recognition software for out-of-class assignments moving forward. 

Parkinson mentioned, however, that the technology does not yet fully accommodate students with speech and language impairments. The transcription of their speech may not accurately reflect what students said into their microphones, which can cause confusion and frustration. 

Repeated Read Alouds

The related but inverse technology of text-to-speech, also known as read-aloud technology, helped Nahal’s students improve their reading skills. The process of hearing text read aloud ensured that words or lines weren’t skipped, improving comprehension. Students could also highlight new words to hear pronunciations or learn definitions, strengthening vocabularies.

For students who might not feel confident reading grade-level material, or who process information better when listening, read-along features for books and articles can be pivotal. Students with attention deficits might benefit from the ability to pause a story to process or take notes, and then press play to resume reading without losing their place.

“[For] kids who might have working memory deficits or trouble recalling information, the ability to listen to something over and over or listen to it as they read it, following along — that can be really powerful,” Conway said. 

Jodi Dezale, a speech language pathologist at Jefferson Community School in Minneapolis pointed to online books as a key resource brought about during virtual learning. The read-along audio feature provided students the autonomy to read books on their own. Tie-in videos from publishers like Scholastic gave students an additional level of engagement for books, encouraging new modes of interaction with familiar images and stories.  

“One of the tools that we use to build comprehension is repeated readings of the same thing. So getting comfortable with seeing something in different ways and using it multiple times was very helpful,” said Dezale.

Accessibility Opportunities

Engagement with both audible and visual modes of learning can also be achieved through closed captioning in class video software. Offered on both Google Meet and Zoom, closed captioning can have benefits for all students. It can make virtual classrooms that don’t have sign language translators more accessible for students who are deaf and hard of hearing. Students with unimpaired hearing can also utilize captions as a secondary cue for their minds, allowing for another way to perceive the material. 

“You’re pairing verbal input with visual input and it’s just more likely to stick in your brain and make sense to you,” Conway said. 

Access to technology is an equity issue. Students gained technological skills during virtual learning that they might not have otherwise gleaned. Many schools engaged with new learning and accessibility tools they didn’t have the bandwidth or funding to try during in-person learning.

Increased familiarity with online platforms and technologies may lessen the digital divide between the schools that had embedded technology before the pandemic and those that newly engaged with modes of digital education over the past year. This offered more students digital skills that may be needed after graduation. 

“They’ve got to be computer literate,” Nahal said. “It’s a literacy issue for me.” 

Teachers who work with students with disabilities specifically can supply their students with tools and methods of enabling accessibility technologies that they can take with them into general education classes.

“When they’re in, say, a humanities class or a science class, that’s where those tools are going to come in handy. And it’s a matter of teaching them how to use the tools,” Parkinson said. 

This not only makes education more accessible, it encourages students to take agency in their learning, spurring greater independence.

For teachers who work with students with disabilities, the instantaneous nature of online assignments’ feedback saves time. Sandra Zickrick works with middle schoolers with disabilities. She shared that before virtual education, she would take each student aside to assess their skills and determine where additional support was needed. Now, she can have all of her students complete simultaneous virtual assessments and immediately receive the results, allowing her to spend more class time providing specific support or doing activities with the entire class.

Beyond the new technologies learned, a number of students with disabilities preferred learning online. For some, doing school from home induced less social anxiety, which led to increased academic confidence.

Attending school from home was less optimal for many students, with many facing challenges of family distractions, Wi-Fi connection issues or an inability to find a quiet place to work. Yet some students were better able to concentrate on schoolwork at home, whether from reduced distractions in virtual school compared to social classroom settings, or from decreased social stress. Online education can allow for greater control over a student’s environment, which can limit external distractors or overbearing external stimuli, benefiting some students with autism, ADD and ADHD. 

“A lot of the physical distractors that happened in a building, that happened in a physical classroom, aren’t the same at home,” Conway said. 

Conway also pointed to the ability for students to revisit lectures, to rewind, rewatch and take their time, as another accessibility tool. The more methods teachers offer for students to access the material and demonstrate that they’ve learned it, the more accessible school becomes for all students.

When students can select how to best prove their knowledge — be it in an essay, video, PowerPoint, Google Doc or other tool — they not only take agency in their learning, but can unlock new creativity. This creativity will be an asset in higher education and in the workforce, Conway said. 

“They now have skills to communicate in a variety of ways, collaborate with other kids and be creative and think critically about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it,” she said.

The specific tools and technologies a school may take on during virtual education may depend on the school’s location, technology team and budget. Yet the fact that more students received technological devices and more schools explored assistive technologies during virtual education helped in the movement to make education more accessible.

“I think the biggest takeaway of this online experience is just that there are things out there for free that we can use,” Conway said. “The sky’s the limit and you just need to Google whatever it is you want.”

MindShift is part of KQED, a non-profit NPR and PBS member station in San Francisco, CA. The text of this specific article is available to republish for noncommercial purposes under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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Effects of using educational technology tools to enhance EFL students’ speaking performance

• Published: 19 January 2023
• Volume 28 , pages 10031–10051, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Mekuriaw Genanew Asratie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9143-0484 1 ,
• Bantalem Derseh Wale 1 &
• Yibeltal Tadele Aylet 1  

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Educational speaking technology is a digital expertise used to enhance speaking performance. This research examined the effects of using educational speaking technology tools: FORVO, YouGlish, and OALD 8th ed. to enhance students’ speaking performance. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest two groups design was used. Test, questionnaire, interview, and teacher-log were used to gather the data from 82 first-year Information communication and Technology (IT) students selected through comprehensive sampling. The experimental group students had learned speaking skills through educational speaking technology tools while the control group students learned using the conventional method. When the quantitative data were analyzed through independent samples T-test, the qualitative data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings of the study uncovered that there was a statistical difference between the experimental and control group students in their speaking performance. Accordingly, the learners who had learned through educational speaking technology have enhanced their speaking performance compared to the students that learned conventionally. Predominantly, students who learned through educational speaking technology were fluent, coherent, and accurate in their speech, rich in lexical resources, used a variety of grammatical ranges, and better in pronunciation. Besides, the students’ have positive perceptions towards using educational speaking technology tools. Consequently, this study recommends researchers, teachers, and students to make the use of educational technology and to go in line with the state of the art.

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Technology plays a great role to deliver education to students outside of school. Commendably, teachers were able to deploy remote learning technologies using a combination of TV, Radio, Online, and Mobile Platforms WBG (The World Bank Group, 2021 ). WBG suggested that using technologies in education can play a crucial role in supporting teachers, students, and the learning process more broadly in order to become effective in their subject matter. In this research, emphasis is given on what effects would be occurred in students’ English language learning in general and speaking performance in particular through using educational technologies.

The technologies have provided us with the use of a number of technology-based tools to enhance students’ speaking skills. Aly et al., ( 2013 ) stated it has become increasingly important in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learning due to the large number of learners who want to use English freely for communicative purposes. It is supported by (Lezaraton, 1996 ) that speaking in a second or foreign language has often been viewed as the most demanding of the four skills. It is known that this skill is one of the main English language skills that students improve. Hence, it should be accompanied by performance consists of fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation which students must learn (Sosas, 2021 ).

The main point in this study is assessing effects of integrating speaking technologies to enhance students’ speaking performance. This implies that there are tremendous technologies to enhance learners’ speaking performance. Educational technologies are occurred and get increased in the world. In Ethiopia also, technology has been increasing to support the education, for utilizing technology is a fundamental practise in EFL. As a result, the use of technology in learning speaking skills is put forward to improve students’ oral performance (Hong, 2006 ). However, English language, which is the medium of instruction in Ethiopia, becomes difficult for teachers and learners as it is not their mother tongue. To overcome such challenge, using educational technology is consulted because it has the power to ease speaking performance obstacles. In line with speaking performance, many scholars such as (Vecchio & Guerrrero, 1995 ) conceptualized it as the ability to use oral language appropriately and effectively in learning activities in different contexts in and outside the classroom. (Richards & Schmidt, 2002 ) also argued that it is speaking rapidly, smoothly, and accurately. Moreover, speaking performance is the feature which gives speech the qualities of being natural and normal.

Therefore, students’ speaking performance can be enhanced when using educational speaking technologies such as YouGlish, Zoom, FORVO, Oxford Advanced Dictionary (8th ed.), Amharic-English Dictionary, the Color Vowel Chart, WhatsApp, Skype, BBC Learning English, and VOA learning English. These technologies are helpful to listen to the pronunciations of unknown words and phrases OPEN (Online Professional English Network, 2020 ). However, in this research, YouGlish, FORVO, and Oxford Advanced Dictionary (8th ed.) were employed to enhance EFL students’ speaking performance at Injibara University.

2 Statement of the problem

Utilizing educational speaking technology in speaking lessons is needed to fill current gaps faced by the conventional methods of teaching speaking skills. Speaking is a challenging practise that requires fluency and coherence, lexical resources, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation (H. Dougles, 2018 ). Previous studies like: (Fajariyah, 2009 ; Hong, 2006 ; Luoma, 2004 , and Nur & et al., 2021) showed that most EFL learners were ineffective in their speaking performance. Students often fear in speaking due to their incapability of fluency and coherence, lexical resources, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation skills.

Besides, the current researchers’ teaching experience also confirmed that EFL students at Injibara University face speaking problems on fluency and coherence, lexical resources, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Hence, the students are unable to speak fluently due to repetition and hesitation. Most of them are also unable to speak coherently with appropriate cohesive features. They do not also use a wide vocabulary resource readily and flexibly to convey precise meaning. Moreover, they do not use a full range of structures and even a range of pronunciation features with precision and subtlety in their speech. This is because the students often do not substantiate their learning through educational speaking technologies that would enhance their fluency and coherence, lexical resources, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Thus, the conventional teaching speaking methods are still in use though the methods do not seem to alleviate the existing speaking problems faced the students. Consequently, this problem motivates the current researchers to seek for better learning methods (like educational speaking technology) that can enhance students’ speaking performance. This is because, as previous research findings unconcealed, using educational speaking technology is essential to fill the gaps of the conventional teaching methods since it combined practical speaking tools that involve students with various audio-video input and let them practise with their own pace. In using educational speaking technologies, the teacher is not a source of knowledge rather the students learn speaking skills using educational speaking technologies. Hence, the teacher is mainly a facilitator of the learning process.

Educational technology is now being carried out to overcome educational problems happening in Ethiopian universities (Assefa, 2017 ). It assists EFL learners to be independent from offline classroom learning. It allows them the choices to work on their learning material at any time of the day (Jonassen, 1996 ; Salaberry, 1999 ; and Rost 2002 ). Particularly, learning speaking skills requires educational technologies including internet, podcasts, video conferencing, videos and speech recognition software, and apps which are paramount ways to assist students’ speaking skills (Omidvar & Bahadorfar, 2014 ). In addition, Alghaber ( 2019 ) remarks technologies are inseparable elements of students’ speaking performance achievement methods.

Nonetheless, EFL students and teachers are not seen in applying technology, which makes learning easy and everlasting. Teachers often give the students with printed handouts consist of full of language skills without integrating authentic educational speaking technologies mentioned above. Today, these conventional materials should be supported by technology. When teachers and learners commit to use only the conventional tools, teaching and learning speaking involves a variety of challenges to them (Sherine et al., 2020 ). As Sherine et al., pointed out the major challenge the EFL learners face is limited number of classes allotted for speaking and lack of resources.

In relation to challenges, many researchers for example, (Atali & Bergil, 2012 ) explored that students were unhappy with their pronunciation, accuracy, fluency, grammar and diction, and they are neither aware of the sound structure of English nor able to articulate the sound due to their inability to use educational speaking technology tools. Therefore, using smartphones or computer products of technology has a positive effect on students’ speaking skills (Sherine et al., 2020 ). However, aside from these materials, integrating appropriate educational technology-based speaking tools to improve students’ speaking performance is necessary. Furthermore, Sosas ( 2021 ) recommends that technology can be aligned in learning speaking skills with communicative way of teaching and learning which allows students to convey themselves in a skillful and competent. Nonetheless, students are hardly incorporating it into education especially in learning speaking skills at Injibara University.

Besides, saying the words, the students and teachers are in threatening due to they use conventional materials (Marilyn & Harcourt, 2019 ). When the students commit mispronunciation, influent, grammar inaccuracy, and memorized utterances of the target language, misunderstanding of message will be happened because of deficiency practise with appropriate speaking tools. However, using educational technology speaking tools enhance the students’ speaking performance since it allows them to practise speaking via the varieties of tools.

As a result, students should be assisted with the combination of today’s educational speaking technologies to enhance their speaking skills. To fill these gaps, this study examined the effects of using educational technology speaking tools: YouGlish, FORVO, and Oxford Dictionary 8th edition on EFL students’ speaking performance.

However, even though there have been national and international previous studies conducted on using educational speaking technology, there are inadequate studies conducted on the effects of using educational speaking technologies on students’ speaking performance. Specifically, using educational speaking technology seems to have been a missing feature of teaching speaking skills, in the study area. Hence, the current study was conducted to fill this research gap in exploring the effects of using educational speaking technology on EFL students’ speaking performance. More precisely, the study has been intended to improve EFL students’ speaking performance in consideration with grammar, vocabulary, fluency, and accuracy. It can also show benefits of using educational tools for teachers, and even ministry of education. Moreover, it is highly important for educational bodies to know integrating technology in education is highly necessary so as to facilitate the teaching learning process easily and attractively since today is requiring people to perform their tasks especially academic events with the support of technology. Accordingly, the following research questions have been constructed: (1) what are the effects of using educational technology speaking tools on EFL learners’ Speaking performance? (2) What are students’ perceptions towards using educational speaking technologies in speaking classrooms?

3 Review of related literature

3.1 speaking performance.

Speaking performance, in this study, is students’ ability or/and proficiency in speaking. Researchers including (Derakhshan et al., 2016 ) stated that speaking is part of learners’ academic life that they should enhance. EFL learners’ speech is needed to be fluent, coherent, accurate in grammar and pronunciation, and enrich in lexical resource. Accordingly, speaking performance, in this study, incorporates fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range, accuracy, and pronunciation.

Fluency and coherence

Speaking with fluency means the individual’s speech flows well without many interruptions (Marilyn & Harcourt, 2019 ; Mairi, 2016 ) also describes that fluency is one’s English language proficiency much better and sounds slicker, more natural, and more impressive for the listeners. Likewise, Luoma ( 2004 ) explains fluency as smoothness, rate of speech, length of utterances, connectedness of ideas, and also absence of excessive pausing. Furthermore, Stockdale ( 2009 ) states that it occurs when somebody speaks a foreign language like a native speaker with the least number of silent pauses, filled pauses, self-corrections, false starts, and hesitations.

However, in EFL, fluency is one of the most difficult aspects to develop within the speaking skills (Briesmaster & Molina, 2017 ). Most students are unable to express their thought fluently. As per the current researchers’ teaching experiences, mostly for those who are learning English language skills, fluency is still a problem since grammar correctness is being given more attention other than fluency. Speaking and coherence are inseparable in speaking performance. In this study, coherence is considered as being smooth, logical and signpost the organization of one’s speech. This is also reinforced by (H. Douglas 2018 ) that one speaks coherently with fully appropriate cohesive features and develops topics fully and appropriately.

Lexical resource

Lexical resources according to Shikhar K. & et al. ( 2012 ) are a language resource consisting of data regarding the lexemes of the lexicon of one or more languages. Students were in danger of having word power of English language even if they have learnt English language from kindergarten to university. Learners were not able to know English words well; they encountered tricky in having presentation and making speech to the audience. However, (H. Douglas 2018 ) argued that students should use vocabulary with full flexibility and precision in all topics and use idiomatic language naturally. Therefore, overcoming such a threatening, learners should be assisted by using educational speaking technology tools.

Grammatical range and accuracy

Nunan ( 2015 ) stated that accuracy is the extent to which the learners’ speech is grammatically acceptable with clear, intelligible pronunciation and appropriate choice of diction. H. Douglas,  ( 2018 ) defined accuracy that the speaker makes his/her speech clear and grammatical. It can be achieved by allowing students to focus on phonology, grammar and discourse while speaking.

In relation to grammar, a research by (Masyithah, 2019 ) concluded that non-native speakers of English language speak with more incorrect grammar than a native speaker would. Students should use full range of structures appropriately while speaking. In learning speaking skills, these conventional materials lack activities supported by sound, transcriptions of words, videos, and colored images. Learning with such materials, the only intervener was instructor, who is non-native speaker of English language skills to teach students about words, accuracy, fluency, grammar and pronunciation.

Pronunciation

pronunciation, which is the component of speaking, is a key to produce acceptable and remarkable speech (Khanh, 2021 ). Hence, learners are expected to perform the elements of pronunciation such as sounds, rhythm, and intonation. In addition, (Wardhani, 2018 ) stated that it is important to make learners’ language intelligible and understandable.

4 Educational speaking technology tools

A study by West ( 2013 ) revealed that EFL teaching and learning has not changed yet in terms of giving equal attention for all language skills. Majority of the English language courses in universities are being learnt through conventional methods excluding speaking skills. Hence, EFL learners still cannot properly speak English to the expected level though they are university students. However, nowadays various technologies are being introduced to learn speaking skills in the classrooms.

Alsuhaim ( 2017 ) investigated learning pronunciation, words, fluency and coherence, grammar and accuracy, which are the components of speaking performance, has moved a drive to integrate educational speaking technology tools as new resources educational speaking technology tools provide students with ample opportunities to practise the elements of speaking and receive feedback. Among these tools, this study combined YouGlish, FORVO, and Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (8th ed) to explore their effects on EFL students’ speaking performance. These technological tools have a number of uses either in sound or video that help learners to get more practical topics which enhance speaking performance. Asides from this, they are user friendly to be used in learning speaking skills as supportive materials.

4.1 YouGlish

YouGlish is a technological tool used to learn pronunciation online. According to Fu & Yang ( 2019 ), YouGlish is a lexical supplementary material to bring an effect on learners’ speaking skills, including pronunciation, intonation, word usage, accuracy, fluency, and grammar. Regarding this, Green ( 2005 ) remarks technology can play an integral part in providing English language students with valuable language experiences as they learn a new language using verbal interaction and a variety of language functions. However, university students do not have the opportunity to use YouGlish to learn EFL for the inaccessibility of technology (Sevy-Biloon & Chroman, 2019 ). This can be a cause in decreasing students’ performance to speak and communicate effectively. Therefore, it is suggested that using technology like YouGlish perhaps enhance students’ speaking performance. In this research, EFL students used this technology in the place where the internet is accessible with desktop or easy handheld mobile phones, and they practised through searching for English words and phrases by listening to the native speakers to enhance their speaking performance at Injibara University.

4.1.1 FORVO

FORVO, which is an online pronunciation dictionary, hosts over 2.2 million sound files that represent utterances of native speakers of many international languages (Bajorek, 2017 ). For instance, languages such as English, French, German, and etc. are found in this educational technology tool. Accordingly, it enables EFL students to improve their speaking performance through listening online to the right pronunciation of English words and phrases. Bajorek ( 2017 ) also remarks that FORVO is the contemporary tool for language learners, instructors, and researchers, and exposes novel pronunciation development chances.

4.2 Oxford advanced learners’ dictionary (8th ed)

Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (8th ed) is a comprehensive digital dictionary for advanced learners. One of the most important resources when learning English is a dictionary, and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is a great digital dictionary specifically geared for learners. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (8th ed) is used to search for words in an easier way. It contains over 180,000 words and phrases. Besides, it helps learners to listen to the pronunciation of words having thousands of audio files with real voices. So, using the dictionary, students can read the meanings of the unknown words with transcription and pronunciation. This helps learners to become rich in word power and enables them to become good at speaking performance (Miller, 2006 ).

5 Effects of educational speaking technology on students’ speaking performance

Educational speaking technology plays an integral part in providing students with valuable language experiences as they learn a new language (Green, 2005 ). These can be used to help providing additional language learning opportunities for EFL students (Green, 2005 ). Furthermore, an exploration on technology in teaching speaking and its effects to students learning English portrayed that integrating technology in teaching methods is a fundamental practise in learning EFL (Sosas, 2021 ). She suggested that using educational speaking technology tools in learning speaking has influences towards EFL students speaking performance.

Similarly, a study conducted by (Fajariyah, 2009 ) on improving grade eight students’ speaking proficiency using games showed that students’ speaking performance improved in answering the teacher’s questions orally, identifying the words and grammar used in the expression, making sentences using appropriate grammar and vocabulary and expressing their idea. Khanh ( 2021 ) reviewed the effects of Communication Technology on learners’ Speaking Skills development, and he found that using communication technology boosts the students’ speaking skills. Likewise, a study conducted on technological tools such as Internet, podcasts, video conferencing, videos and speech recognition software indicated that these have been regarded as ways of helping students to improve speaking performance (Omidvar, & Bahadorfar,  2014 ).

Khanh ( 2021 ) concluded that even though speaking is not a skill that students can learn at home alone, learners can be assisted to study by themselves outside the classroom due to the growth of technology. Besides, (Gunada, 2017 ) investigate a research on “Using YouTube Video; An IT-based Media to Improve Students’ Speaking Skill.” The result showed that using such technologies is promising to improve EFL students’ speaking performance. Educational speaking technology gives students better exposure toward the aspects of speaking performance.

Miller ( 2006 ) investigated the effect of English learners’ dictionaries on international students’ acquisition of the English article system. The results showed that dictionaries can help students to improve their English language skills. Besides, students who use dictionary were good at grammar from those who do not use, and it is used to increase learners’ vocabularies.

6 Students’ perceptions towards using educational technologies in speaking classrooms

Perception towards educational speaking technologies affects students to use educational speaking technology tools in their speaking classes. In this regard, different scholars tried to assess students’ perceptions towards using educational technologies in speaking classrooms in a more generalized way rather than studying it specifically. From these, (Yousif & Abeer, 2021 ) is one of them who has done research focusing on students’ perception on virtual classrooms and its impact on their communications in Saudi Arabian university students. The result showed that even though the students showed positive attitudes towards virtual classrooms, the majority of them disagreed on their effectiveness in helping students recognize their oral mistakes. Consequently, students perceived that recognizing mistakes and getting feedbacks and also lack of face-to-face communication had a negative impact on their communication in virtual classrooms.

Another research was also done by Alhaisoni ( 2016 ) on Saudi EFL preparatory students’ perception of using dictionary. The results revealed that students showed positive attitude towards using bilingual dictionary, online dictionaries and Google translators than print versions. Hence, the researcher finally recommended that teachers should learn about educational technologies.

Moreover, Daniel J. et al., ( 2017 ) conducted a study on students’ use and perception of technology enhanced learning in a mass lecture knowledge-rich domain first year undergraduate classes in England at Northumbria University. The finding showed that students perceived that using Twitter as a technological learning tool has a greater impact in their education. However, such studies are scanty in Ethiopian context. Hence, studying the effect of using educational technologies speaking tools in Ethiopia has become very timely and crucial.

7 Methodology

7.1 research design.

This study aimed at assessing the effects of using educational speaking technology tools on EFL students’ speaking performance. To achieve this objective, the researchers used a quasi-experimental design that consists of pretest and post-test with two group participants accompanied by mixed research approach. In quasi experiential research design, two groups of participants (the control and experimental groups) were often used, and pretests and post tests were given to both groups of students.

8 Participants

The participants of the study were 82 first year Information communication and Technology (IT) students who were taking “Communicative English Language Skills II” course in sections ‘A’ and ‘B’ at Injibara University. The students were chosen using comprehensive sampling technique.

9 Data collection instruments

The data were gathered through test, questionnaire, semi-structured interview, and teacher log. While the test comprised both pre-test and post-test, it was used to collect quantitative data on students’ speaking performance especially on their fluency and coherence, grammar range and accuracy, lexical source and pronunciation. The pre-test consists three parts of speaking tasks that the students provided a guided talk about their experiences. The post-test also comprised three parts that the students spoke on the given topics. Each test has a total weight of 36% based on the IELTS Speaking Band Descriptors. The second data gathering tool was questionnaire which measured students’ perceptions towards utilizing educational speaking technology tools to improve their speaking performance. It was designed with 15 closed-ended items with likert scale measurements labelling from Strongly Disagree (1) to Strongly Agree (5). Semi-structured interview was also used to collect data from twelve students on their perception towards using educational speaking technology tools. The last one was teacher log which the teacher took notes during the intervention on students’ engagement using the educational speaking technologies.

10 Data collection procedures

To collect the essential data, the data gathering tools including tests and questionnaire were equipped. First, the IT students assigned in section ‘A’ were taken as control group, and those who were enrolled in section ‘B’ were identified as experimental group. Then, the pre-test consisted of three presentations was given to both control and experimental groups to know their speaking performance: fluency and coherence, lexical resources, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Both groups were given a chance to speak about three different topics within five minutes for each three presentations.

After the completion of the guided talk in the pre-tests took fifteen minutes and marked from 100%, the intervention was carried out. In the teaching learning process, the control group students assigned in section ‘A’ learned speaking skills with the conventional material i.e. module. The handout “Communicative English Language Skills II ” that IT students must take during their stay at university was used for control group students. Using this material, the teacher taught the control groups speaking skills with different tasks. For example, the students were given oral activities sharing problem-solving experiences to classmates based on scenarios, describing things in comparing and contrasting technique, having debates, place descriptions, and etc. to improve students’ fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammar range and accuracy, and pronunciation. With such materials, teaching and learning process took place over two months in which students learned speaking skills for three hours per week.

For the experimental group students assigned in section ‘B’, educational speaking technology tools: YouGlish, FORVO, and Oxford Advanced Learning Dictionary 8th edition (OALD 8th ed) were installed on the desktop computers in English Language Improvement Centre (ELIC) and on their easy hand held phones. Next, the teacher oriented the students on how they can use these tools to enhance their speaking performance. And, the teacher assisted students in opening YouGlish and searched for English words such as village, Bilharzia, confront, interested, interesting, favorite, and etc. to listen to an exact pronunciation. Second, with FORVO, the students practised in listening to the pronunciations and meanings of unfamiliar words like build, building, where, why, struggle, and etc. on the desktop computer. Besides, (OALD 8th ed) was used to listen to the exact pronunciations, meanings of the words in different parts of speeches with examples in a sentence form. Students also learned about IPA transcriptions words to say correctly using this dictionary. Aside from this, students were practising through recording their pronunciation with the help of recorder, and later listening what they recorded. With the same teacher, the intervention was lasted for two months likewise in conventional materials for three hours per week. During the intervention, teacher log was held in both control and experimental group students. The teacher wrote down his experiences such as weaknesses, strengths, impacts, and etc. of conventional material, and YouGlish, FORVO, and (OALD 8th ed) during his intervention.

After the two months of intervention, both groups of students were evaluated in the post-test which was identical with the pre-test. In this test, the control and experimental groups were tested with guided speeches that include overall description of their schools, favorite field of study, and a persuasive speech on the best measurements that the people should take to overcome COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the questionnaire was administered both groups to measure their perceptions towards using educational speaking technology tools for enhancement of speaking performance.

11 Data analysis methods

The collected data were analyzed through quantitative and qualitative methods. First, the quantitative data gathered through tests were analyzed through independent samples T-test using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 26 software program. The independent samples T-test was used to determine if there were differences on control and experimental groups’ improvements on speaking performance including fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammar and accuracy, and pronunciation using conventional materials and educational speaking technology tools before and after the intervention. Similarly, the data from questionnaire were analyzed in descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation to indicate EFL students’ perception towards using educational speaking technology tools to improve their speaking performance. In addition to this, the semi-structured interview and the teacher’s log were analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques.

In this part, the results the study on the students speaking performance and their perception towards using speaking technology tools are presented. The results of this study are based on the data gained through tests, teacher log, interview, and questionnaire.

13 Students’ speaking performance enhancement

The students’ speaking performance enhancement was assessed through tests, and the data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test. Besides, a qualitative data gathered through teacher log was also used to supplement the quantitative data on students’ speaking performance enhancement.

The descriptive statistics result in Table  1 shows that the experimental and control groups had akin speaking performance in the pre-test. Hence, while the experimental group had a (M = 36.45 SD = 1.783), and the control group had (M = 35.20 SD = 1.572). Though it looks as if the means and standard deviations of both the experimental and control group students had some variances, the differences were not significant. Thus, it implies that both groups had similar speaking performance in the pre-test. Nevertheless, the students’ mean score and standard deviation result in the post test were statistically different. Table  1 indicates that the experimental group had (M = 46.29 SD = 2.452), while the control group had (M = 36.92 SD = 2.141) in the posttest.

Most importantly, the independent samples t test result in Table  2 also depicted that Levene’s test for equality of variances exhibited no violations, P  = .216. The output gained from the independent t-test indicates that there was a statistically significant difference between the control group and the experimental group t (80) = 1.553, P < .05, d = 0.509). It divulges that the EFL learners who had learned speaking skills through speaking technology tools have surpassed in their speaking performance.

It is the first day that I am beginning to teach students speaking skills with speaking technology tools. The students seem new to the technology tools while I introduced them the names of the technologies. The students do not know what YouGlish and FORVO are. Almost all of the students know that Oxford dictionary is used to know the meanings of new words, but they were not aware of its use to listen one’s own sound of pronouncing words. When I tried to show them how the technologies can be used, most of the students were in difficulty to even to operate the speaking technology tools.

The teacher log, reported in the mid of the intervention, indicated that the students were familiar with the speaking technology tools, and students were using them though they were not that much effective. For example, the teacher reported:

Nevertheless, today, the students used educational speaking technologies while learning speaking skills. They have practised speaking skills through YouGlish, FORVO, and Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (8th ed).

Moreover, the teacher log written towards the end of the intervention showed:

… now, the students have practiced pronouncing various words using the OALD dictionary. Most of the students had pronounced the words in a better way compared to their pronunciation performance shown while I introduced the speaking technologies to them. They also learnt vocabularies through the Words in the news.

14 Students’ perceptions in educational speaking technology

This study examined EFL students’ perception towards using educational speaking technology to enhance speaking performance. Accordingly, the experimental group students’ perceptions were examined through questionnaire and semi-structured interview. The findings showed that the students had positive perceptions towards using educational speaking technology to develop their speaking performance. Particularly, the students were interested to use educational speaking technologies as it is shown in Table  3 .

As the descriptive statistics result in Table  3 depicted, the students had (M = 4.38 SD = 0.669) on whether they enjoy using educational speaking technology in their speaking classes. It implies that the students had positive perceptions in using educational speaking technology since the mean value was greater than 3, the mean value. Similarly, the table also showed that the students had (M = 4.29 SD = 0.463) to using educational speaking technology enhances speaking performance which indicates that they had positive perception to it. The students’ response to whether they would like to use educational speaking technologies to do speaking activities (M = 4.19 SD = 0.602) showed that they had positive views to educational technologies. The students also replied that they became better English speakers when they use speaking educational technologies (M = 4.38 SD = 0.669). As it can be seen in the table, the students’ responses (M = 4.57 SD = 0.598) implied that using educational technologies helps them to make their speech clearer. Finally, the students confirmed (M = 4.43 SD = 0.598) that they look forward to educational speaking technologies in speaking classes. “

Table  4 showed that the students had (M = 4.62 SD = 0.590) on whether using educational speaking technology improves fluency. The result implies that the students had positive views towards using educational speaking technologies to develop their lexical resources. In the same manner, they also viewed (M = 4.57 SD = 0.598) that using educational speaking technology improves coherence. They believed that educational speaking technologies develop students’ lexical resource, (M = 4.33 SD = 0.577). Likewise, the students had (M = 4.48 SD = 0.602) which indicates that they viewed educational technology increases grammatical range. Similarly, the students perceived (M = 4.33 SD = 0.658) that educational technology increases speaking performance in terms of accuracy. Lastly, the students viewed (M = 4.33 SD = 0.658) that using educational speaking technology enhances pronunciation skills. Thus, the results exhibited that the students had viewed using educational speaking technologies was effective to enhance speaking performance.

The students also understood that the specific educational speaking technologies including FORVO, YouGlish, and OALD had significant roles to enhance their speaking performance.

Hence, Table  5 depicted that using FORVO helps (M = 4.38 SD = 0.669) them to develop their speaking performance in general and pronunciation skills in particular through listening online to the native speakers’ pronunciation. In the same manner, the students confirmed (M = 4.33 SD = 0.577) that using YouGlish in speaking lessons serves them to enhance their speaking performance including pronunciation, intonation, word usage, accuracy, fluency, and grammar. To end, the students’ response (M = 4.43 SD = 0.598) indicated that using Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary helps them to develop speaking skills. The results, therefore, implied that the students viewed using FORVO, YouGlish, and OALD had significant roles to develop speaking performance.

Among twelve of the interviewees, most of them, ten students reported that the AOLD helped them to practice pronunciation, learn grammar and accuracy, lexical resource while YouGLish and FORVO supported them to develop their fluency and coherence. When one of the interviewees illustrated this point, she said:

I have not ever been experienced in using YouGlish, FORVO and other educational technologies to improve my speaking skills. Of course, I have used English dictionaries, but they were hard copies and not prepared for advanced learners which are helpful for college students. For example, my previous dictionary had no CD to be installed on desktops. Now, I have experienced on how to use the speaking technologies. Even, I feel that I pass time with native speakers when I use YouGlish and FPRVO.

Another participant also replied:

I wish to go to English speaking countries to learn the language through immersion though I cannot get the chance. But now I can learn English here in my country via the technologies and improve my language to be native like. I want to pronounce English [words] like the native speakers because I want to seek for scholarship and learn my second degree abroad.

However, some of the interviewees, two of all had some concerns on the relevance of the technologies for they cannot understand the native speakers’ speech due to lack of adequate background knowledge of speaking skills. When one of these two students forwarded:

We should study African and Ethiopian English to communicate with our local community, and serve it effectively. Why do we bother to be like native speakers using the pronunciation tools? Even the people in our village may not understand my speeches if I can pronounce words like what native speakers perform.

Nevertheless, most of the interviewees underlined that the educational technologies were helpful to learn speaking skills better, and they reported that the technologies will have significant roles in their future jobs since English is the language of the world. All in all, the findings inferred that the students had positive perceptions on using educational speaking technology because they were interested to use the technologies, the effectiveness of using the technologies, and viewed that the technologies had significant roles to enhance their speaking performance.

15 Discussions

This article examined effects of utilizing educational technologies to improve students’ speaking performances, and it assessed what the students perceive about the technologies used in our article such as FORVO, YouGlish, and OALD (8th ed). The outcomes of this study are able to insight applying technology in education is ideal since it assists the learners but also the teachers to make education easy, clear, suitable, and interesting. Besides, the users of this technology have to build a positive view.

With regard to the firs research question, which is focusing on effects of using educational technology speaking tools on EFL learners’ Speaking performance, it has been found that the experimental group students have outperformed over the control group students in speaking performance it is because the descriptive statistics shows that experimental group (M = 46.29 SD = 2.452), while the control group had (M = 36.92 SD = 2.141 in the posttest. So, it can be understood that using speaking educational technology enhanced the students’ speaking performance than delivering the conventional method of teaching speaking skills. This is supported by Khanh ( 2021 ), Omidvar & Bahadorfar ( 2014 ), and Sosas ( 2021 ). They argued that when the language learners are assisted with technology, they will have the new learning opportunities. The authors on their side, it is believed that specifically, for non-native speakers of English language, utilizing technology that includes videos, images, and pictures as well as the audios can help them get improved on their speaking performances. In addition, the Independent Samples T test of control and experimental group and the teacher log have showed that the students are able to surpass their speaking performances with the support of educational technology tools including what are noted above. The teacher log assured the students in the experimental group have enhanced their speaking performance in terms of fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. For instance, as the teacher’s log showed the students were not able to speak out fluently, accurately, and coherently before using the speaking technology tools. However, the teacher log confirmed that the students’ speaking performance have been enhanced after the technology based speaking lessons given in the intervention. Similarly, the teacher log reported that the students’ pronunciation skills had been improved while they practised the speaking technology tools that were given in the intervention.

On the whole, the findings gained through the tests and teacher log indicated that using educational speaking technologies enhanced the experimental group students’ speaking performance in terms of fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. In other terms, the educational speaking technology students used a variety vocabulary; they were fluent and coherent in their speech; they were grammatical and accurate while speaking, and their pronunciation was also by far better compared to their own prior experiences and the control group students.

Conversely, the control group students, in their post-intervention speaking tests, were not effective in vocabulary choice, not fluent and coherent, poor in lexical resource, ungrammatical and inaccurate, with wrong pronunciation of words. The control group students were ineffective because they did not use educational speaking technologies in their speaking lessons. They were mainly dependent on the teacher and the printed handouts to develop their speaking performance. They did not get the chance to practise speaking skills using speaking educational technologies.

These infers that the enhancements in the experimental group were attained as a result of using educational speaking technology tools that focused on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Hence, in order to enhance their speaking performance, the experimental group students used the education speaking technology tools. For instance, they used “YouGlish” to practise pronunciation, intonation, word usage, accuracy, fluency, and grammar. In addition, they also used “FORVO” to listen and learn how native speakers pronounce words and phrases.

Besides, the students also used Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (8th ed) to learn pronunciation skills, fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy. Particularly, the dictionary helped students, first, to listen the native speakers’ pronunciation of words and phrases and, then, to listen one’s own pronunciation of words and phrases. This practise enabled the students to learn pronunciation and coherence. The dictionary also provides alternative dictions for a certain word or phrase with lots of synonyms and antonyms that enabled the students to develop their lexical resource. Apart from this, since the dictionary has various sentence structures constructed in a certain word or phrase, the students were benefited to increase their grammar and accuracy skills. This study, therefore, revealed that educational speaking technologies could be used to enhance students’ speaking performance since using the educational speaking technology tools enables them to practise fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation.

The second research question is intended to know that the student’s perception towards utilizing educational technology tools so as to improve their speaking performance as mentioned in the above. In relation with this, the result showed that the students have a positive perception about technology tools this is because each items under students’ perceptions in educational speaking technology section, as shown Tables  1 and 2 , and 3 , the mean values show that greater than 3. In sum, the results revealed that the students were interested on using educational speaking technology in their speaking lessons. Besides, the students had also positive views on the effectiveness of using educational speaking technology. In support of the questionnaire data, the results gained through the students’ semi-structured interview also confirmed that they had positive perceptions in utilizing educational speaking technologies like YouGlish, FORVO, and AOLD (8th edition). However, the current findings were not alike to the research findings discovered by Yousif & Abeer ( 2021 ). The study conducted by Yousif & Abeer ( 2021 ) showed that even though the students showed positive attitudes towards virtual classrooms, the majority of them disagreed on the effectiveness of the virtual classrooms in helping students recognize their oral mistakes. The students perceived that recognizing mistakes and getting feedbacks and also lack of face-to-face communication had a negative impact on their communication in virtual classrooms. These findings were comparable with most research findings conducted by previous researchers though they also disagree with some previous research findings.

16 Conclusions and implications

The present research has investigated the effects of using educational speaking technology tools on EFL students’ speaking performance. The study shows that using educational speaking technology in speaking lessons enhanced students’ speaking performance since the tools including FORVO, YouGlish, and OALD (8th ed) enabled students to practise fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation which are the core features of speaking abilities.

The result shows that the experimental group students’ speeches were fluent and coherent, rich in lexical resources, grammatical and accurate, and smooth in terms of pronunciation when they have used educational speaking technologies as mentioned above in EFL speaking classes. In terms of these feature, the control group students, on the other hand, were ineffective to produce speeches. This was because the control group students have learnt speaking skills through teacher prepared printed handouts without using educational speaking technologies like YouGlish, FORVO, and Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary. Therefore, when students used the educational speaking technologies and sufficiently practised pronunciation, diction, sentence structure, and flow of ideas with the technologies they would enhance their speaking performance. Hence, using educational speaking technology is recommended as resources to enhance students’ speaking performance.

The findings also show that the students had positive perceptions towards using educational speaking technology to develop their speaking performance. The students have perceived positively on using educational speaking technology because they were interested to use the technologies, and they viewed that the technologies have significant roles to enhance their speaking performance. Thus, it infers that it is a need to encourage using educational speaking technology to enables students in practicing the speaking skills based on the native speakers’ speeches. Subsequently, EFL teachers need to use educational speaking technology in their speaking classes to enhance their students’ speaking performance. Similarly, speaking course material designers should reconsider educational speaking technologies while designing speaking course teaching materials. In addition, EFL learners have to use educational speaking technologies to make effective speech which is understandable by both the native and non-native speakers. Finally, the number of educational speaking technologies (YouGlish, FORVO, and Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary– 8th ed) addressed in this study were relatively small. In addition, the time taken for the intervention was also not adequate to incorporate and use more educational speaking technologies.

Nevertheless, it is not to mean that the findings of the current research are not comprehensive since at least three educational speaking technologies were being applied during the intervention. Similarly, it is not to mean that the intervention period was inadequate because the students have practised speaking skills with the aforementioned technologies for eight weeks. It is, therefore to mean that the findings of the study would have been more comprehensive if a greater number of educational technologies were integrated in the intervention, and more amount of time had been given to the intervention so that the students practised with the technologies. Consequently, future studies should be conducted on the effects of using some other educational speaking technologies on students’ speaking ability.

Data Availability

the authors declared that the data supporting the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to containing information that could compromise research participant privacy/consent.

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Asratie, M.G., Wale, B.D. & Aylet, Y.T. Effects of using educational technology tools to enhance EFL students’ speaking performance. Educ Inf Technol 28 , 10031–10051 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11562-y

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Speech on Education And Technology

Education and technology are like two peas in a pod, always making each other better. They’re changing how you learn, making it more fun and interactive.

It’s like your school bag is getting lighter, but your brain is packing in more knowledge! Isn’t it exciting to see how technology is reshaping education?

1-minute Speech on Education And Technology

Friends, today we talk about two powerful things that shape our world – education and technology.

Now, let’s talk about technology. You all know what it is! You see it in your phones, computers, and video games. It’s magic that helps us do things faster and better.

So, what happens when we mix education and technology? We get something amazing, like a super key! It makes learning fun and exciting. Imagine studying about dinosaurs and then seeing them come alive on your screen. That’s the power of technology in education.

But that’s not all. With technology, we can learn from anywhere. You can be at home, in the park, or even on a holiday and still attend your class. You can talk to people from different corners of the world and learn about their culture and history. It’s like having the whole world in your hands!

But remember, every good thing needs to be used wisely. Just like you don’t eat your entire week’s candy in one go, you shouldn’t misuse technology. Spend time in the real world too. Play, explore, and learn from nature.

In the end, education and technology are here to help us. They are tools to make us smarter, better, and ready for the future. So, let’s embrace them, use them wisely, and shape a brighter future for all of us.

2-minute Speech on Education And Technology

Good day! Today, we’re going to talk about two very important things – education and technology. Imagine a pencil and paper. Now, think about a computer. These two sets of tools have the same goal: to help us learn and share ideas. But they do it in very different ways. We’re going to explore how technology is changing education.

Let’s start with distance. In the old days, if you wanted to learn something, you had to find a teacher or a book. Sometimes, they were very far away. But now, with the internet, we can learn from anyone, anywhere, anytime. You can be in your room in New York and learn about pyramids from a teacher in Egypt. Technology breaks down the walls of the classroom.

Now, let’s talk about creativity. In a traditional classroom, you listen, you write, and maybe you draw a little. But with technology, you can create videos, build websites, design graphics, and more. It’s not just about learning facts. It’s about using those facts to make something new. Technology gives us the tools to be more creative in our learning.

But like all powerful tools, technology can also be misused. Sometimes, we get so caught up in playing with our gadgets that we forget to learn. Or we might use the internet to find answers to our homework without really understanding the work. It’s important to use technology to help us learn, not to cheat or distract us.

In conclusion, remember this. Education is like a journey. And technology is like a car. It can take us far and fast. But we are the drivers. We decide where to go and how to get there. So, let’s use technology wisely on our journey of learning.

We also have speeches on more interesting topics that you may want to explore.

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• Speech Writing /

Short Speech on Technology for School Students

• Updated on  
• Jun 4, 2024

Have you noticed how rapidly everything around us is changing? Can you imagine a day without relying on technology? Need to make a call? Want to search for something online? None of this is possible without access to technology. Technology has become an essential part of our lives, influencing everything from education to research and development. In this article, we’ll provide you with examples of short speeches on technology that you can use in various settings. Keep reading to learn more.

Table of Contents

• 1 1-minute Speech on Technology
• 2 Short Speech on Technology
• 3 10 Lines on Technology

Quick Read: Speech on No Tobacco Day

1-minute Speech on Technology

Also Read: Speech Writing Format, Samples and Examples

Short Speech on Technology

Also Read: 160+ Best and Easy English Speech Topics for Students

10 Lines on Technology

Here are 10 lines of technology that can be applied to any speech or writing topic. Feel free to use them.

• Technology is the ever-evolving application of scientific knowledge for practical uses.
• From simple tools to complex machines, it shapes our world.
• Communication, transportation, and entertainment have been revolutionized by technology.
• Computers and the internet connect us globally, sharing information instantly.
• Medical advancements and automation improve lives and industries.
• However, responsible use is crucial to avoid ethical dilemmas and environmental impact.
• Technology empowers us, but we must choose its direction.
• The future holds exciting possibilities with artificial intelligence and space exploration.
• Adapting to new technologies is key to thriving in a changing world.
• Technology is a powerful tool, let’s use it wisely for a better future.

Ans. To write a short speech on technology, add small and informative details in your speech, such as the advancements in recent years, the advantages and disadvantages of technology, and how it can shape a better future. Make sure to keep it short, add statistics and to the point to keep your audience engaged.

Ans. Here are 5 latest technological developments: Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning; 5g connectivity; Quantum computing; Virtual and Augmented reality; and Blockchain.

Ans. Technology refers to the development of scientific knowledge to develop tools, systems and processes.

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For more information on such interesting speech topics for your school, visit our speech writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Educational Technology as One of The Terms For Enhancing Public Speaking Skills

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Speech on Technology for Students and Children

3 minutes speech on technology.

We live in the 21st century, where we do all over work with the help of technology. We know technology as the name “technological know-how”. Read Speech on Technology.

Also, it implies the modern practical knowledge that we require to do things in an effective and efficient manner. Moreover, technological advancements have made life easier and convenient.

We use this technology on a daily basis to fulfill our interests and particular duties. From morning till evening we use this technology as it helps us numerous ways.

Also, it benefits all age groups, people, until and unless they know how to access the same. However, one must never forget that anything that comes to us has its share of pros and cons.

Benefits of Technology

In our day-to-day life technology is very useful and important. Furthermore, it has made communication much easier than ever before. The introduction of modified and advanced innovations of phones and its application has made connecting to people much easier.

Moreover, technology-not only transformed our professional world but also has changed the household life to a great extent. In addition, most of the technology that we today use is generally automatic in comparison to that our parents and grandparents had in their days.

Due to technology in the entertainment industry, they have more techniques to provide us with a more realistic real-time experience.

Get the Huge list of 100+ Speech Topics here

Drawbacks of Technology

On the one hand, technology provides users with benefits or advantages, while on the other hand, it has some drawbacks too. These drawbacks or disadvantages negatively affect the importance of technology. One of the biggest problems, which everyone can easily observe, is unemployment.

In so many sectors, due to the over practice and much involvement of technology the machines have replaced human labor leading to unemployment.

Moreover, certain physiological researches teams have also proved their disadvantages. Because of the presence of social media applications like Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Instagram, etc. the actual isolation has increased manifold. And ultimately it leads to increased loneliness and depression cases amongst the youngsters.

Due to the dependence of humans on technology, it has deteriorated the intelligence and creativity of children. Moreover, in today’s world technology is very important but if the people use it negatively, then there arises the negativity of the technology.

However, one thing that we need to keep in mind is that innovations are made to help us not to make us a victim of this technology.

How to use Technology?

Today we have technology that can transform lives. We have quick and vast access to the reservoir of knowledge through the Internet. So, we should make good use of it to solve the problems that we have around the world.

In the past, people use to write a letter to people that take many days to reach the destination, like the money order, personal letter, or a greeting card, but now we can send them much easily within few minutes.

Nowadays, we can easily transfer money online through our mobile phone and can send greetings through e-mail within a matter of minutes.

Besides, we cannot simply sum up the advantages and usefulness of technology at our fingertips.

In conclusion, I would say that it depends on a person that to what degree she/he wants to be dependent on technology. Moreover, there is nothing in the world that comes easy and it’s up to our conscience to decide what we want to learn from the things that we are provided to us.

Technology is not just a boom but a curse too. On one hand, it can save lives, on the other hand, it can destroy them too.

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• Speech on Technology

Technology in This Generation

We are in a generation, where technology has surrounded us from all sides. Our everyday life runs on the use of technology, be it in the form of an alarm clock or a table lamp. Technology has been an important part of our daily lives. Therefore, it is important for the students to be familiar with the term technology. Therefore, we have provided a long speech on technology for students of all age groups. There is also a short speech and a 10 lines speech given in this article.

Long Speech on Technology

A warm welcome to everyone gathered here today. I am here to deliver a speech on technology which has taken a tremendous role in our day to day life. We all are in a generation where everything is dependent on technology. Let’s understand what technology is through the lens of Science. 

Technology comes in the form of tangible and intangible properties by exerting physical and mental force to achieve something that adds value. For example, a mobile phone is tangible, and the network connection used by the phone is intangible. Technology has taken its place as indispensable, wherein it has resulted in economic benefits, better health care, time-saving, and better lifestyle.

Due to technology, we have a significant amount of knowledge to improve our lives and solve problems. We can get our work done efficiently and effectively. As long as you know how to access technology, it can be used and proves to benefit people of all ages greatly. Technology is constantly being modified and upgraded every passing year. 

The evolution of technology has made it possible to achieve lots in less time. Technology has given tools and machines to be used to solve problems around the world. There has been a complete transformation in the way we do things because of contributions from scientific technology. We can achieve more tasks while saving our time and hence in a better place than our previous generation. 

Right from the ringing of the morning alarm to switching off the fan, everything runs behind the technology. Even the microphone that I am using is an innovation of technology and thus the list continues. With several inventions of hi-tech products, our daily needs are available on a screen at our fingertips. These innovations and technologies have made our lives a lot easier. Everything can be done at the comfort of your home within a couple of hours or so. These technologies have not only helped us in the digital platform but have also given us innovations in the field of medical, educational, industrial as well as in agricultural sectors. If we go back to the older generations, it would take days to get any things solved, even if there were not many treatments for several diseases. 

But today with the innovations of technology, many diseases can be treated and diagnosed within a shorter period of time. The relationship between humans and technology has continued for ages and has given rise to many innovations. It has made it easier for us to handle our daily chores starting from home, office, schools and kitchen needs. It has made available basic necessities and safer living spaces. We can sit at home comfortably and make transactions through the use of online banking. Online shopping, video calling, and attending video lectures on the phone have all been possible due to the invention of the internet. 

People in the past would write letters to communicate with one another, and today due to technology, traditional letters have been replaced by emails and mobile phones. These features are the essential gifts of technology. Everything is just at our fingertips, right from turning on the lights to doing our laundry. The whole world runs on technology and hence, we are solely dependent on it. But everything has its pros and cons. While the benefits of technology are immense, it also comes with some negative effects and possibly irreversible damages to humanity and our planet. 

We have become so dependent on technology that we often avoid doing things on our own. It as a result makes us lazy and physically inactive. This has also led to several health issues such as obesity and heart diseases. We prefer booking a cab online rather than walking a few kilometres. Technology has increased screen time, and thus, children are no longer used to playing in the playgrounds but are rather found spending hours on their phones playing video games. This has eroded children’s creativity, intelligence, and memory. No doubt, technology is a very essential part of our life, but we should not be totally dependent on it. We should practise being more fit and do regular activities on our own to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The other aspects that have been badly affected us are that since technology replaced human interference, is unemployment. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc., were meant to connect people and increase our community circle. Still, it has made people all the more lonely, with cases of depression on the rise amongst the youth. 

There are several controversies around the way world leaders have used technology in defence and industrialisation under the banner of development and advancements. The side effects of technology have resulted in pollution, climate change, forest fires, extreme storms, cyclones, impure air, global warming, land area getting reduced and natural resources getting extinct. It’s time we change our outlook towards selfish technology and bring about responsible technology. Every nation needs to set aside budgets to come up with sustainable technological developments. 

As students, we should develop creative problem solving using critical thinking to bring clean technology into our world. As we improve our nation, we must think of our future for a greener and cleaner tomorrow. You would be glad to know that several initiatives have been initiated to bring awareness amongst children and youth to invent cleaner technology. 

For example, 15-year-old Vinisha Umashankar invented a solar ironing cart and has been awarded the Earth Shot Prize by the Royal Foundation of the duke and duchess of Cambridge and honoured to speak at the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Her invention should be an inspiration to each one of us to pursue clean technology.

The top five technologically advanced countries are Japan, America, Germany, China and South Korea. We Indians will make our mark on this list someday. Technology has a vital role in our lives but lets us be mindful that we control technology and that technology doesn’t control us. Technology is a tool to elevate humanity and is not meant to be a self-destroying mechanism under the pretext of economic development. Lastly, I would like to conclude my speech by saying that technology is a boon for our society but we should use it in a productive way. 

A Short Speech on Technology

A warm greeting to everyone present here. Today I am here to talk about technology and how it has gifted us with various innovations. Technology as we know it is the application of scientific ideas to develop a machine or a device for serving the needs of humans. We, human beings, are completely dependent on technology in our daily life. We have used technology in every aspect of our life starting from household needs, schools, offices, communication and entertainment. Our life has been more comfortable due to the use of technology. We are in a much better and comfortable position as compared to our older generation. This is possible because of various contributions and innovations made in the field of technology. Everything has been made easily accessible for us at our fingertips right from buying a thing online to making any banking transaction. It has also led to the invention of the internet which gave us access to search for any information on google. But there are also some disadvantages. Relying too much on technology has made us physically lazy and unhealthy due to the lack of any physical activity. Children have become more prone to video games and social media which have led to obesity and depression. Since they are no longer used to playing outside and socialising, they often feel isolated. Therefore, we must not totally be dependent on technology and should try using it in a productive way.

10 Lines Speech on Technology

Technology has taken an important place in our lives and is considered an asset for our daily needs.

The world around us is totally dependent on technology, thus, making our lives easier.

The innovation of phones, televisions and laptops has digitally served the purpose of entertainment today.

Technology has not only helped us digitally but has also led to various innovations in the field of medical science.

Earlier it took years to diagnose and treat any particular disease, but today with the help of technology it has led to the early diagnosis of several diseases.

We, in this generation, like to do things sitting at our own comfort within a short period of time. This thing has been made possible by technology.

All our daily activities such as banking, shopping, entertainment, learning and communication can be done on a digital platform just by a click on our phone screen.

Although all these gifts of technology are really making our lives faster and easier, it too has got several disadvantages.

Since we all are highly dependent on technology, it has reduced our daily physical activity. We no longer put effort to do anything on our own as everything is available at a minute's click.

Children nowadays are more addicted to online video games rather than playing outside in the playground. These habits make them more physically inactive.

FAQs on Speech on Technology

1. Which kind of technology is the most widely used nowadays?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field of technology that is being used the most nowadays and is expected to grow even more even in the future. With AI being adopted in numerous sectors and industries and continuously more research being done on it, it will not be long before we see more forms of AI in our daily lives.

2. What is the biggest area of concern with using technology nowadays?

Protection of the data you have online is the biggest area of concern. With hacking and cyberattacks being so common, it is important for everyone to ensure they do not post sensitive data online and be cautious when sharing information with others.