2 authors: Gina Biancarosa University of Oregon 49

Equipment and Systems Upgrades and Maintenance

As options for using e-reading technology for educational purposes proliferate, school systems are struggling to provide equitable access to e-reading devices, texts, and appropriate technological supports. A system of governance that needs to protect limited funds faces the need to continually upgrade technological supports and infrastructure.
Meanwhile students across demographic categories report that the available technol- ogy resources at school are unsophisticated.⁶⁹

The unprecedented rate of technological change can create a sense of urgency to adopt the latest innovation without attending to how new tools affect students, teachers, professional development, and infrastructure systems. For example, schools frequently lack the advanced hardware and Internet band- width needed to use the most innovative software, applications, and web pages.⁷⁰ Although e-mail and most web browsing require only 50 kilobytes per second (kbps), television-quality streaming video requires 250 kbps, and interactive videos require 300 kbps.⁷¹ And these requirements are for each user. Indeed, the Consortium for School Networking estimates that an 800-student high school with 50 faculty and staff needs

7.45 megabytes per second to handle expected traffic.⁷² Schools must keep pace with the ever-increasing processing and bandwidth demands so that they can not only leverage the latest e-reading technology, but also keep abreast of the changing workplace
and real-world technological demands as they prepare their students for life after school.

Data Accessibility, Usability, and Security

E-reading technology offers educators
time-efficient tools for gathering, accessing, and interpreting data needed to produce the assessments essential to decision making.
Used effectively, electronic assessments can minimize the time teachers need to take away from instruction and practice and maximize the timeliness of the information they use to tailor instruction to students’ individual needs. Technology offers administrators and policy makers multiple coordinated data sources to improve their understanding of their educa- tion systems. And it can enrich research efforts to investigate the match between students and services and how they evolve over time.

Two types of systems capture information. Learning management systems deliver instructional content to users, whether students engaged in reading or other learning tasks or teachers engaged in professional development. These record-keeping systems usually track learners’ engagement with content as well as their performance on linked content-related assessments. By contrast, student information systems offer a database approach to keeping track of a wide range of student information, including assessment scores, grades, schedules, attendance, and more—a modern alternative to the filing cabinets that historically have lined the walls of school and district central offices.

Although developers of both types of tools have tried to build efficiencies into the systems, teachers and other educators often receive little training in how to use them, particularly in the service of improved instruction. Despite developers’ clear

recommendations to include end users in implementation plans, a mere 30 percent of surveyed school information-technology leaders reported that teachers were repre-
sented on core implementation teams, and an even smaller share reported demonstrating how to integrate tools into instruction and assessment.⁷³ Although school and district leaders generally believe training for teachers is adequate, teachers report that it does not match their daily needs for aligning instruc- tion to assessment results.⁷⁴

Student data in particular raise issues of protecting student safety, well-being, and civil rights. Students and their parents should have choices about what data is collected, how it is used, and with whom it is shared.

The Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which was enacted to protect student privacy, does not yet adequately address the increased risks to privacy associ- ated with Internet connectivity.⁷⁵ School sys- tems will therefore also need to bolster and improve online security on an ongoing basis to keep up with threats to student privacy.