SAN JOSE, Calif. — Children's classrooms are fast becoming high-tech hubs.
New education tech applications are changing what teachers can do, who they can reach and how much power they take back from a standardized system. Others strive to give teachers a precious gift: time.
Clad in a knight costume for dress-up day, EJ Torres, 5, looked around his classroom at Rocketship Brilliant Minds as he opened his laptop. He quickly lifted up a laminated piece of paper with a QR code, thrusting it in front of his computer's camera with a giggle.
With that one move, Torres was immediately logged into a dashboard full of educational apps and games. With one click he selected DreamBox, a math application, and the game began — a big change from how class computer time used to start. Teacher Haley George says getting her four- and five-year-olds logged on could eat up 20 minutes.
“It took forever,” George, who teaches kindergarten at the charter school, says. "Four and five-year-olds are typically still building the fine-motor muscles needed to hold a pencil and button up their own coats, let alone type a nine-digit username and password into a keyboard."
The badge with the QR is a product of education technology company Clever, which has simplified the way students in almost half of U.S. schools sign on to more than 225 different educational applications,
The Clever Badges, which are currently in 4,585 schools, sound simple, but George says they've been revolutionary in giving her time back with her class and giving her students the independence to log into apps she's selected for her classroom.
One of the biggest changes happening in education technology is a change in power: from district-based standard curriculum to teachers specializing their classroom applications based on students' needs.
"Teachers, rightly so, are making more and more frequent decisions about the tools and resources that they are using in the classroom," said Ben Wallerstein, co-founder of Whiteboard advisors, a consulting firm focused on education technology. "They have high-speed Internet access. They have mobile devices. They are not stuck with the decisions that were made by the principal."
Victoria Ruane, a 5th-grade elementary school teacher at Lincoln Elementary in Edison Township, N.J., says there are so many education technology products on the market, she has to be very particular about what she chooses. "You need to be critical about which are worth using in the classroom."
Her favorite application is Newsela, a program which takes news articles and rewrites them for reading levels from second grade through high school. Right now, more than 850,000 teachers and 9 million students in the U.S. use the product.
Ruane uses Newsela to share up to five versions of the same article with her students every day so they can all take part in the lesson. "I never used to be able to use articles for my class, now I can have six kids reading at different levels and we can have a conversation together,” she says. "It’s changed everything."
Education tech for PreK-12 was a $8.38 billion industry in 2014, the Software & Information Industry Association reported — and it was on the rise. But all those products don’t necessarily mean great classroom experiences.
"If it’s well designed, it can be fantastic. If it’s poorly designed, it can be awful,” says Nigel Nisbet, vice president of content creation at MIND Research, a non-profit that is working to change the way kids learn math. "We are very vulnerable to the churn with the new popular things and no research to back them up."
MIND Research believes one answer for the future of education is game-based learning. It created ST Math games, a game-based, visual computer program for students to learn math, which is used by about 1 million K-8 students.
“We need to be asking 'what can technology do to change the learning experience for students in ways that haven’t been possible?’” Nisbet says. "There is potential is to do way, way more with education technology than saving time and differentiating curriculum.”
DreamBox is hoping to do both: reimagine how kids learn math while helping teachers cater their curriculum to each individual student.
"In elementary school, teachers are generalists," says Jessie Woolley-Wilson , CEO of DreamBox Learning. "Now they are expected to create STEM experts, math experts and science experts. How can they do that with 30 kids at 30 different levels of readiness?"
But the biggest gift education technology has given Smith? "Time," Smith says. "Before ClassDojo it was really just email — and teachers get a bajillion emails a day."
More than two-thirds of schools in the U.S. use ClassDojo, a communication app that helps students, teachers and parents share what's happening throughout the school day through photos, videos and messages.
Smith also notes that ClassDojo's translation features have helped her connect with a number of the parents who don't speak English. "It's a game changer."
Anything bad about more technology in classrooms? Not for Smith.
"Anything that I can use in my classroom that is going to save me time and paper — I am all about it."
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