Show Us the Money

Funding leads the list of ed-tech hurdles at T + L show

By Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2006

What’s the biggest challenge in education technology? Funding. That’s according to 50 percent of respondents in a recent survey conducted by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which released the results at the organization’s 20th annual T + L (Technology + Learning) Conference held in Dallas, November 8–10.

The same old saw, perhaps, but every little bit helps when it comes to lobbying on behalf of the nation’s schools, according to Deborah Rigsby, NSBA’s director of federal legislation. “Funding for state ed-tech grants has been slashed. This has an impact on everything, how schools will acquire hardware and their ability to achieve 21st century goals.”

With T + L occurring on the heels of the November 8 election, Rigsby is hopeful that the resulting shift in power, which favored Democratic legislators, will also favor education. NSBA is working to support the Spector-Harkin amendment to restore federal funding for education, health care, and other programs by $2 billion, she says. This will help boost education technology state grants, which were enacted at $272.3 million in FY 06 and zeroed out by President Bush in his February budget request for FY 07. In addition, “There’s the renewal of NCLB and the Telecommunications Act, which will affect e-rate, two critical pieces of legislation that we have a great stake in,” says Rigsby. “Now we’re seeing a great willingness on both sides of the aisle to work together in a bipartisan way so these things will get addressed.” Still, money isn’t the only factor in the complex enterprise of getting our schools up to 21st-century learning speed. Other major hurdles reported by the approximately 1,200 conference registrants polled were integrating technology in the classroom (45 percent) and proving that technology benefits student learning (17 percent).

Regarding social networking, nearly 36 percent said the content of student postings on MySpace and similar sites is disruptive to the learning environment. So what’s the biggest problem? Students posting inappropriate material, according to 70 percent, and students revealing too much personal information (62 percent).

“It is important to keep in mind that just blocking access to social Web sites at school is not the end of the story, says Anne Bryant, NSBA’s executive director. “Most of the misuse of these sites takes place at home, but still affects the classroom. We have to teach our students about the safe and proper use of social Web sites.”

“It is great to hear other groups realize that blocking doesn’t solve the root problem,” says Chris Harris, who coordinates the school library system for the Genesee Valley (NY) BOCES. Harris, a panelist at SLJ’s November 3–4 Summit (News, p. 18), says that he and fellow summit attendees also grappled with social networking and considered how to leverage the popularity of these tools within schools. “Schools that adopt these new technologies for regular instruction will have much higher credibility when they begin conversations about appropriate and inappropriate use outside of school,” says Harris.

“The problem with this is that we have to really and truly adopt the social tools, not create hobbled facsimiles that our students see as lame attempts to “fit in” with changing technologies,” he adds.