Educational Technology: A Review of the Integration, Resources, and Effectiveness of Technology in K-12 Classrooms

Abstract

There is no questioning that the way people live, interact, communicate, and conduct business is undergoing a profound, rapid change. This change is often referred to as the "digital revolution," which is the advancement of technology from analog, electronic and mechanical tools to the digital tools available today. Moreover, technology has begun to change education, affecting how students acquire the skill sets needed to prepare for college and a career and how educators integrate digital technological instructional strategies to teach. Numerous studies have been published discussing the barriers of integrating technology, the estimated amount of investment that is needed in order to fully support educational technology, and, of course, the effectiveness of technology in the classroom. As such, this article presents a critical review of the transitions that technology integration has made over the years; the amount of resources and funding that has been allocated to immerse school with technology; and the conflicting results presented on effectiveness of using is technology in education. Through synthesis of selected themes, we found a plethora of technological instructional strategies being used to integrate technology into K-12 classrooms. Also, though there have been large investments made to integrate technology into K-12 classrooms to equip students with the skills needed to prepare for college and a career, the practical use of this investment has not been impressive. Lastly, several meta-analyses showed promising results of effectiveness of technology in the classroom. However, several inherent methodological and study design issues dampen the amount of variance that technology accounts for.

Faculty Members’ Concerns about Adopting a Learning Management System (LMS): A Developing Country Perspective

“…Strong management concerns indicate an intense concern with the logistical aspects of LMS implementation. Examples of logistical concerns that are mostly related to technology integration in education include proper infrastructural support, free time, and access to and use of suitable resources (Ocak, 2011;Delgado, Wardlow, McKnight, & O'Malley, 2015). Such concerns can be explained by the lack of training, where the majority of the participants (87%; n=41) had not receive training regarding the use of LMS.…”

Open Science 2.0: Large-Scale Collaborative Education Research

“…Repeatedly producing research that does not answer essential questions is a waste of researcher time and resources. For example, it has been difficult to determine the effectiveness of integration of instructional technology in the classroom because of variance in commitment to learning new teaching methods (Delgado, Wardlow, McKnight, & O'Malley, 2015;Nicol, Owens, Le Coze, MacIntyre, & Eastwood, 2018). Researchers can collaborate ahead of time to define sufficient level of fidelity and how fidelity can best be measured.…”

Do the onebillion maths apps promote young children’s mathematics attainment?

“…The importance of contextual factors in the effectiveness of CAI was discussed in a review by Delgado et al (2015), who identified different ways of integrating technology in schools. They distinguished between the use of technology to replace teaching on the one hand, and blended learning on the other hand; in the latter, device-driven and face-to-face teaching are combined in different ways depending on the aims of the school, the capabilities of the teachers and pupils, and institutional factors, such as availability of resources.…”