Factors Impacting Effective Technology Use: Digital Infrastructure

During my professional lifetime, school systems nationwide have spent billions of dollars equipping classrooms with the newest technologies in the hope of preparing students for a future work force. How many times have I heard futuristic terms like world of work, 21st Century skills, or wireless society? In the early 80’s, it was Apple IIe’s and MS-DOS machines, in the 90’s, it was the iMac G3, Carmen SanDiego, VHS Tapes, AOL Dial-Up, and Microsoft’s transition to Windows. Since then, we have seen many latest fads come and sometimes go – all with the promise of changing the educational landscape. Remember when interactive white boards and TI-80 calculators were the thing! 

But what impact have these technologies – old and new, had on teaching innovation in the classroom? The 20th Anniversary Edition of the LoTi Digital Age Survey will attempt to determine the degree of correlation between classroom digital infrastructure and the Level of Teaching Innovation (LoTi) using the variables below representing classroom digital infrastructure: 

• No access to digital resources 
• Teacher workstation only 
• Classroom laptop/mobile device station(s) 
• Access to laptop/mobile device cart(s) 
• One-to-one laptop/mobile devices 
• BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) 

By conducting comparative analyses with variables such as classroom digital infrastructure, district and campus leaders will be able to make more focused decisions as to the real needs of their constituents toward maximizing the impact of technology infrastructure on the continuous improvement process in the classroom.

This blog post is the second in a series of fourteen online entries highlighting factors that impact the effective use of technology in today's classrooms. This series focuses on each of the research variables used to conduct comparative analyses as part of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the LoTi Digital Age Survey.