The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has released the first of their policy briefings on the role that technology plays in student achievement. This is another peer-reviewed longitudinal study based on the results achieved in state-wide programs in Michigan, Texas, and Iowa. You can download the PDF file of their article–Technology and Student Achievement— The Indelible Link–directly from this link, or visit ISTE’s Support EdTech site.

There’s a lot of interesting conclusions in this article, including ones that track closely the results we received in our own internal survey of teacher attitudes towards technology. You can see the results of that survey at this spiffy little page with pie charts and all, but the real keys to both the ISTE study and our own results can be seen in the statistics. In Palm Beach County schools our teachers have this to say about the use of technology in their classroom.

  • An astounding 97% of teachers agree or strontly agree with this statement: My students show increased interest and attention in class when I incorporate technology into my lessons.
  • Nearly the same number of teachers agreed with this statement: The use of technology in my lessons allows my students to see real world connections to the subject they are learning.
  • 84% of our teachers agreed with that The use of technology in my classroom has a profound impact on student motivation and classroom behavior.

Does this provide definitive proof that technololgy has a major impact on learning? Between the ISTE study of the work done in other states and the same results from our own teachers it certainly appears evident that the debate about the efficacy of educatational technology has been settled in many ways. Is there “bad” uses of instructional technology out there?

Do we need to do a better job of training our teachers and choosing the best technologies for use in our classrooms? You betcha. But the question on whether there is value in educational technology is continuing to be settled in study after study.