In my last data collection for this course, I focused on technology in my classroom. For a bit of context: The school I’m working in was the first primary school in Switzerland, which equipped every student with an iPad.
On top of it, all classrooms were equipped with visualisers, smartboards (interactive whiteboards) and projectors.
With this enormous investment came certain expectations from the school board and headteachers to use the provided tools as often as possible. During various school inspections, teachers would have to show how they use different tech during class themself and how you increase students engagement with technology. On another note, I’m highly critical because teachers were not prepared at that time to juggle all these demands. Moreover, you would have to question this approach from a pedagogical point of view!
I noticed that I often used technology for certain phases during my lessons, so each triangle represents 15 minutes. You can read from the data visualisation which technology came into use and which year the students are in. Furthermore, you can tell from the colour on the right whether I used the tool or my students.
You can tell that I am using the laptop and projector quite often, which I primarily use in the lesson’s introduction stage. My students used their iPad in nearly every class. I often engage them to use it as a tool during the phase of independent practice or for a quick formative assessment at the closure.
Especially my younger students like working with the smartboard when they learn about new material. However, I use the visualiser more with my older students to quickly go over an image or a text from their textbooks or to correct a worksheet together.
I feel with my lessons, I’m ‘ticking’ the box of frequent use of technology in my classes. More on this and how this adds to schools’ governing power within the education system in my upcoming reflection on this Block.
The point that jumps out here is your comment about the separation between investment in the tech and its pedagogical value. It is a huge concern that so much investment is made in equipping or “instrumenting” classrooms, with little evidence of the beneficial effects. However, the result is that well-equipped classrooms have become ideal sites for data collection. So the fairly mundane, if expensive, task of equipping classrooms is ultimately a key part of the expanding “datafication” of education. And as you note, only *some* schools have this level of investment, which raises all manner of questions about inequality of access to classroom technology and the partiality of the data that can be produced as a consequence.