Are Digital Tools Cultivating Learning?

Now that technology has infiltrated most aspects of teaching, I think it is time for me to reflect on how I use technology in my classroom. For the past 15 years, I have been a big advocate of using technology to help me teach my students, but recently I have been reflecting on when to use it.

In my Pre-Covid classroom, students got excited about using technology, and their engagement increased when they used it in class. I continually looked for ways to include different types of technology in my classroom. However, technology went from being a novelty to being a necessity. During Covid, students became saturated with technology, which seems to have changed how students learn and retain information.

In the fall of 2019, I left teaching to become a Digital Interactives Developer. I returned to teaching in the fall of 2022, and I was amazed at how different my students were from the ones I had left three years earlier. The biggest change I observed was that students were no longer retaining information like they used to, and they seemed apathetic about the need to retain information for long periods of time. Recently, I’ve seen many posts in different teacher groups about poor student knowledge retention and many comments about how technology is rotting the minds of students. While these comments are meant in jest or said in frustration, I began to wonder if technology has changed how students think and whether we need to be aware of these changes so that we can better teach them.

This question hit me one night while watching my son study for his spelling test. He brought his Chromebook home and was provided a game to help him practice his spelling words. He happily played the game for 20 minutes.

I asked him if he was ready for the test and he said that he was. I said, ”Great!”, took out the spelling list, and asked him to spell a word. He couldn’t spell that word or any of the words correctly. Frustrated, I made him write out each spelling word several times. This process took an hour and there were many tears of frustration from both of us, but by the end, he knew how to spell the words. Through this experience, I realized that while playing the game, my son was only thinking about winning the game. He had assigned no value to learning how to spell the words.

The next day, I started watching how my students interact with technology. The textbook I teach from has a homework help link provided. When we purchased the textbook, we liked this option because it gave students an opportunity to get help any time they needed it. We thought that students would think about each problem, try to answer the problem on their own, and only use the link to get help when they get stuck. While some of my students follow this process, I’ve discovered that the majority open the homework help and look at the hints and the answers before they even start working on the problem. To them, the technology is there to help them complete the assignment, not to help them learn and internalize the information. This problem is much more widespread than the help link in the textbook. I’ve been watching students in my advisory class work on their assignments for other classes, and the same thing happens. Students are using the digital tools that are meant to help them transfer information into knowledge as tools to complete assignments. The result is that students have no long-term retention because new knowledge was not created.

Now that I have started to observe my students through a new lens, I have realized that I can’t expect students to use tech tools like I do. Our brains are wired differently. I grew up not having these tools and, therefore, assign value to them differently than my students do. I use technology as a tool to help me when I can’t do something on my own, but my students see technology as a tool to do the work for them. I wonder if the fast switch to online learning during Covid shifted emphasis from knowledge making to assignment completion?

It would be easy to argue that I should stop using technology in the classroom, but I believe that the solution lies in how I use technology. I need to be purposeful in choosing the technology my students have access to as well as how they use it. I can’t just teach using digital tools; I need to teach my students how to learn from using digital tools. I need to help students pull out the important information from the virtual world and use it in the physical world. I need to assign digital lessons that bring out student thinking instead of focusing on correct answers. While this sounds complicated, I have two powerful tools in my toolbox that help me.

For the last two years, I have been building a thinking classroom (BTC) that emphasizes the thinking that goes into solving a problem instead of just getting the answer itself. This teaches students to place value in forming new knowledge and helps them retain it. I write about this more in my article What My Toughest Class Taught Me This Year. One of the practices suggested in a thinking classroom is to have students solve problems on whiteboards hung around the room. As a result of this practice, I constantly have concrete examples of student work displayed around my room.

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About a decade ago, I discovered Desmos Classroom lessons. These lessons are fun and interactive and help students explore concepts in a way that was not possible without technology. What sets Desmos Classroom lessons apart from other digital tools is the type of feedback students receive. Instead of instantly telling students if their answer is correct, feedback is interpretive and natural. Desmos Classroom lessons also do a nice job of getting students to think about mathematics and the connections between different representations. There is more information about digital lessons and BTC in my article Whiteboards vs Chromebooks.

Adding Integers Splat!!! By Robin Kubasiak

As much as I love assigning Desmos Classroom lessons, I have noticed that my post Covid students aren’t internalizing the information like my students did before Covid. My current students are very happy to keep trying different values until the interactive works instead of thinking about the connection between the number they are typing and what is happening in the graph. I have discovered that combining BTC practices with Desmos Classroom lessons allows me to push my students to think more deeply and reach a higher level of understanding. Instead of having students work by themselves or with another person, I assign them to a random group of three, and I have one of the students record their observations and answer questions on the whiteboard. This helps to transfer the mathematics from the virtual setting into concrete examples.

Desmos Marbleslides are some of my favorite activities. On each slide there is a set of stars and a graph of an equation. The goal is to change the equation so that a marble can roll down the graph and through each star, allowing students to explore how different parts of the equation affect the graph in an interesting and fun way.

I used to have students work on Marbleslides in pairs so that they could discuss what to try and what they observe. But lately, I have noticed that fewer discussions are happening between students. Instead, one student is trying numbers quickly and the other student is watching without input. Therefore, neither student is making connections between the numbers in the equation and the graph. To mitigate this issue, I sometimes have students work in a group of three and write down the equations they are trying on the whiteboard along with a reason why the marble won’t go through each star. (The graph is too high, not long enough, too far right, etc.) This records their attempts and documents their answers for the class to see. The process of writing out the equation forces the students to slow down and really think about how and why they are changing the equation and how that change affects the graph. It is this reflection process that students are missing when they are quickly typing in numbers until something works, if it works at all. A bonus of the work being on the whiteboards is that students can compare answers and see how other groups thought about the problem, realizing that there is not one solution to each problem.

I used this same approach with my son and his next spelling list. He played the same game as before but wrote the word on a whiteboard app on my iPad before typing it into the game. If the word was spelled incorrectly, then he had to rewrite it correctly before he could go to the next word. I thought this process would take him longer to play the game and that he wouldn’t be that excited about writing down the words. However, he finished the game faster and won more rounds because he didn’t have to redo the words over and over due to guessing. When I quizzed him on the words, he was able to spell most of them correctly. We were both very happy!

I am still currently working on fixing my homework help issue. I think the key is in teaching students the value of practicing math problems through self reflection, but that is something to discuss another time.

I would love to hear your stories about this topic. Please feel free to add your story to the comments.

Here are more places to look for digital activities that help students explore mathematics.

• Desmos Classroom

• Polypad Virtual Manipulatives

• SolveMe Puzzles

• Phet Simulations

• GeoGebra