Overview:
Over-reliance on educational technology in rural schools with unstable infrastructure disrupts learning when connectivity fails.
Educational technology is great, and it is one of the key ways that districts can provide their teachers with a variety of options to help their classrooms.
BUT, there is a cost. Especially for teachers in rural communities.
My last school was located in a rural community in the mountains of East Tennessee. Rural, low-income, the county is plagued by poor, outdated infrastructure as it relates to the roads, electricity, internet, water, etc. I can think of multiple instances where I arrived at school in the morning only to find that the WiFi was down, which meant that I was out of luck trying to get anything done that morning; this does not even account for the times that the WiFi quit working after we had already arrived at school and were now partway through the day, again, stranding teachers.
In areas like this, where the power or the WiFi goes out due to poor infrastructure, bad weather, or various other reasons, the heavy reliance on ed tech means that teachers have almost nothing on which to fall back when we do not have access to this technology.
Now, do not get me wrong, I love educational technology. It makes it so much easier to get certain things done in the classroom, especially my foreign language class. The idea that I did not have to devote whole days to speaking activities, but could simply assign the students a recording to complete using their Chromebooks? That was genius, and made it possible for me to get so many more speaking assignments completed.
The issue that I have is the over-reliance on educational technology.
At multiple schools, I found that administrators, all the way from principals up to central offices, pushed teachers to rely solely on ed tech tools. Online portals for textbooks, the use of internet tutoring services, digital flashcards, everything was supposed to be digital. Along with the idea of schools being 1:1, a Chromebook for every student in the building, the goal was that even low-income children whose families could not afford a laptop at home would still be able to complete their assignments and make progress with their education.
Living in this community, I discovered a couple of issues with this approach.
- If a teacher is out, nobody preps the subs on how to use the ed tech to get lessons done, so the students are still usually a lesson behind when the teacher returns.
- Teachers are only occasionally asked to come up with low-tech backup lesson plans for those days when the WiFi goes down, they are out unexpectedly, etc. So the idea of having a low-tech backup is not even really entertained.
- If a teacher does make low-tech backup plans, like paper worksheets or something, nobody bothers to make copies for the students, or nobody collects the assignment, or some similar issue.
I can give a prime example. I have now gone through two maternity leaves at two different schools, and both times were complete disasters. I left countless assignments, I set up lesson plans, warmups, notes, worksheets, etc., along with answer keys – everything that a sub could possibly need to run my class for a month while I was out (and do not even get me started on how a month is totally insufficient as maternity leave). I doubt I got even 1/10th of the assignments from ¼ of the students in my classes while I was on leave.
Think about those numbers for a second. Let us say that, on average, we complete 100 assignments in a month, ranging from daily bellringers to worksheets to speaking assignments to quizzes to projects. So 1/10th of that would be 10 assignments. On average, I had about 20 students in my classes; divided by 4, and that comes out to 5 students. So I could not even get a total of 50 assignments out of 2000 from just one class, while I was out on leave. Now, obviously there is the common issue of being short on subs, and that is a universal issue across all school districts, in my experience. However, I would argue that the insistence on using educational technology alone in the classroom contributed to the struggles I had getting students to complete assignments while I was on leave.
There is another perspective that needs to be taken into account here, one that is no less relevant in rural areas: what happens to students who do not have WiFi at home when all of their assignments are online?
What happens when your student lives on the side of a mountain?
Another prime example is when COVID hit, and the entire nation was sent home on lockdown. I had a student in the school where I was teaching at the time, who lived literally on the side of a mountain. His family did not have WiFi at home. I could not judge, because at that time, I did not even have power at home. My husband and I used a generator for power when we first moved to this community. I had to print off paper copies of assignments for half a semester and deliver them to this boy’s home because, otherwise, he would not have been able to complete anything for my class.
What happens when your student can not afford Wi-Fi?
Here is another recent example: when I had a student in my last year of teaching whose family did not get WiFi at home until midway through the year because they simply could not afford it. Health issues, lack of work, inflation, etc., all contributed to her parents being unable to get WiFi at their house. Now, this school district did provide Wi-Fi hotspots to students without Wi-Fi at home during the COVID lockdown, so that was good, but what about once the lockdown was over? How was she supposed to complete her assignments for all of her classes each day without the internet at home?
What happens when you have virtual days in rural communities?
One final example. Virtual days are still a somewhat common practice in rural communities – my last district used a couple on snow days when we had storms that produced nearly a foot of snow, making it impossible for buses to access huge chunks of the county for over a week. My family has satellite WiFi, so I am at the mercy of the weather when it comes to my WiFi at home. There were numerous times when I simply could not complete office hours or upload assignments because the cloud cover was so thick, or it was snowing so hard, or raining so hard, that our WiFi was down.
In all of these instances, the over-reliance on educational technology made it impossible for my students or me to get anything done in situations where the use of technology was not feasible.
That being said, I am not, by any means, suggesting we throw out all educational technology.
I am pointing out that the idea of reinventing the wheel for education goes against the idea of “work smarter, not harder.” Whiteboards and dry erase markers worked fine in the past, why did we suddenly transition completely to PPT slides? Worksheets were a perfectly adequate way of having students complete assignments, so why did we suddenly move entirely to Google Forms or online textbook/curriculum portals? Students still need practice taking notes so they can do real adult things like plan a vacation itinerary, or plan a grocery list, or make a financial plan for their family, or make plans for some project at work, so why did we suddenly stop requiring them to get notebooks to take notes in class?
As a caveat, I will also state that in more suburban or urban environments, these concerns may not be very applicable. Since, however, so many students in our country live in rural areas, I do think they are worth bringing up. This might also be a chance for further introspection to be given to the idea of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to education. Educators all know that this does not work for a variety of reasons, related to test scores, literacy rates, STEM opportunities, etc. It is definitely important to note that the infrastructure in these communities may not even support the widespread push to incorporate more and more ed tech into the classroom. I would argue that it would be better if individual districts were given more leeway to determine what would be most helpful for their particular student population.
