Free and Easy: A Rubric for Evaluating Everyday Technology
Before a recent school year, one of my oldest friends—who now teaches special education courses at a middle school outside of Detroit—shared his excitement of being granted a SMART Board interactive whiteboard in his classroom. The SMART board allows users to write in “digital ink,” mark-up electronic texts (such as Word documents and websites), and save the results for future reference or sharing. The company who produces the boards boasts claims of students’ increased engagement and motivation as a result of using the product ("SMART Technologies"), which undoubtedly translates into why educators like my friend and his school district were so enthusiastic to incorporate them into their classrooms.
Though my friend had every reason to be excited (he’s an excellent teacher in one of the most underappreciated divisions of education) his news was barely off his lips before I began my protestation against SMART Boards. I provided every counter-argument I could imagine: SMART Boards cost more money than most school districts are willing to spend. They can be a teacher-driven technology, often too protected to be widely used by students in a consistently democratic fashion. They, like most new technology, may cause immediate excitement, but once the novelty wears off they’re likely to be used as glorified dry erase boards. As I continued, though, I realized the futility of my arguments; I realized, in fact, that I didn’t have any legitimate reason to offer why this technology couldn’t be used smartly and effectively in the classroom. Of course, there has been considerable research and discussion into the value (or not) of these boards (such as Stephanie McCrummen’s piece in a 2010 Washington Post article), but my kneejerk reaction came from one small detail my fellow teacher mentioned that is likely repeated dozens—if not hundreds—of times in writing classrooms across the country each year: through no fault of his own, he had no idea how he was going to use the technology to enhance his classroom. This small detail, it turns out, is not so small.
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