Loretta Kelley and Cathy Ringstaff, WestEd
2002
In the 1980s and the early 1990s, businesses across the United States invested heavily in information communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers and networking systems but received few benefits in terms of increased productivity. It seemed a lot of workers simply used the new technologies to do pretty much what they had always done or, worse, used it to play games and randomly surf. Thus, their productivity remained flat. This combination of increased investment in ICTs and stagnant productivity even got a name-the Solow Paradox. By the mid-1990s, however, workers, often the younger ones within a firm, began using this technology to change the way they did their jobs. As a result, the U.S. economy boomed during the second half of the decade. The lesson for schools: it is not enough to invest in technology alone. To produce benefits, it must be allowed to change the way the organization and its employees operate. This is the conclusion of "The Learning Return on Our Education Technology Investment," a report by WestEd's Regional Technology in Education Consortium that reviews major research findings related to technology use in education. The authors do not claim to have discovered a scientific basis for the effective use of technology in education but argue that they have identified factors associated with effectiveness that repeatedly appear in the largest research studies of technology in education. To wit: 1) technology is best used as one component in a broad-based reform effort; 2) teachers must be adequately trained to use the technology; 3) teachers may need to change their beliefs about teaching and learning; 4) Resources must be sufficient and accessible; 5) effective technology use requires long-term planning and support; and 6) technology should be integrated into the curricular and instructional framework. In short, educational technologies are most effective when used to change how learning gets done. To read the report, surf to http://www.wested.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619.
