Teaching Our Way to Digital Equity

In recent years, educators have used the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition) model to describe the ideal trajectory of teachers as learners with new technology. The very same general pattern can be found in Judith Sandholtz's research from the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project in the 1980s and the five-phase model that she defines as Entry, Adoption, Adaptation, Appropriation, and Invention (Dwyer, Ringstaff, & Sandholtz, 1991). Both models illustrate two things. First, most teachers need to go through a developmental process of professional learning to achieve more ambitious transformations of teaching through technology. Yet most teachers do not do so. Second, the teachers who do develop innovative uses of technology are more commonly in learning environments that serve affluent and advantaged students. School districts that serve diverse student bodies--or homogenous student bodies in poverty-impacted communities--face a special dilemma in technology adoption and integration. Technology adoption can accelerate inequalities "within" individual schools. As technology transforms civic life, the trades, professions, industries, and academic disciplines, it becomes increasingly difficult to prepare students for a networked future without equitably engaging them in networked learning in schools. There are no silver bullets in education. There is no problem that educational technology will magically solve. The hard parts of creating equitable schools will remain hard. But the great potential of educational technology to improve teaching and learning will only be realized if ed-tech efforts go hand in hand with a commitment to digital equity.