Digital Equity: Five Essential Weekly Indicators
Digital Equity: Five Essential Weekly Indicators
By Douglas Reeves
September 21, 2020
This is the first in a series of brief articles about digital equity. Each week, we will provide educators and leaders with an immediately applicable strategy that will help students, teachers, and leaders focus on what matters most. My commitment to you is that these ideas will help save time and money and move decision-making processes from fragmented to focused. Schools are buried under the weight of software and programs that are often duplicative and uncoordinated. Among the many lessons of the pandemic is that false definitions of “equity” not only failed to help students who needed help, but actively hurt some of them. Moreover, we learned that equity is not just about delivery – it’s about learning, teaching, and leadership.
My observation from on-site travels and virtual conversations with administrators and teachers around the nation is that much of the instructional technology is unused. Where it is used, teachers are spending too much time manually connecting different systems for noninstructional resources, curriculum, assessment, grading, and other key functions. Even when there are abundant Google Certified teachers, Power School University graduates, and intensive participation in weeks of instructional technology, workshops about using technology are not leading to the ultimate test of equity: learning for all students. Here are five Digital Equity Indicators you can track in the next five days.
Digital Equity Indicator #1: Instructional Technology Inventory
Get a list of every single thing teachers are using, starting with district-authorized programs and continuing through until the list is complete. Don’t settle for the official list of technology that district leaders purchased. Ask teachers, para-professionals, and students: What instructional programs are they actually using? If you paid a million dollars for a computer-delivered curriculum and assessment program, but in the classroom, you see digitized worksheets from Teachers Pay Teachers, you’ll see that the pile is a lot bigger than you thought. You can’t begin to assess the widely varying levels of digital implementation until you have this inventory. My research (and that of many others) suggests that when schools have more than six priorities, they lose focus. Ask most teachers today, and you hear a list of many more than six priorities they are attempting to address.
Digital Equity Indicator #2: Meaningful Access
This is more than just delivering computers to homes and ensuring that all student have connectivity. Access is not just about delivery, but about engagement. Every Friday, take a random sample of 100 students – about eight per grade level – and just ask this question: How many of those 100 students submitted evidence of learning? This does not mean “attendance” but something that at least one time during the week demonstrated evidence of learning This might be a quick reading diagnostic assessment, a writing sample, or engagement in other classroom or home activities. Remember, you are trying to get a quick pulse of digital equity, not a year-long study. So, don’t wait for perfect data analysis – 100 randomly selected students should be enough to tell you whether or not students are showing some evidence of learning. This critical indicator will let instructional coaches, technology support officers, teacher-leaders, and building administrators identify the islands of excellence where technology is clearly helping students learn, and where there is only the illusion of delivery – machines and meetings, but no evidence of learning.
Digital Equity Indicator #3: Student Keyboarding Skills
Find the percentage of students by grade level who have keyboarding skills necessary to submit work in a virtual environment. This is the digital equivalent to asking, “Is the computer plugged in?” No amount of technological sophistication will benefit students who need keyboarding skills to submit work. This is a fairly easy problem to remedy, as students can learn keyboarding and show progress on their accuracy and speed even if they don’t have great connections. I’m seeing too many schools make the assumption that every student has keyboarding skills, and that’s not an accurate assumption, even for middle and high school students.
Digital Equity Indicator #4: IT Help Desk Response Times
You don’t have an instructional technology help desk? In fact, every school does, and it’s a mix of formal channels – such as vendors and developers and designated experts in the school system – and informal help, including students, parents, and colleagues who are not part of the official technology channels. Tracking help desk response times doesn’t have to be complicated. A random sample of 30 teachers will tell the tale on a two-item survey:
1. Did you need help in instructional technology this week?
2. How long did it take you to get the help you needed?
Digital Equity Indicator #5: Interaction and Active Engagement
You can measure this by determining the percentage of virtual classrooms observed that showed evidence of interactions with the students and active engagement. In a 10-minute drop-in observation, coaches and administrators can tell whether the virtual classroom involves students or is just one-way communication. For more details on how to do digital observations, see my earlier blog on the subject here. Even the extremely busy administrator can make a couple of 10-minute observations each day, and that will allow you track progress in effective instruction – the heart of digital equity – every week.
Do you have some digital equity success stories to share? If so, please write me here or call me directly at 781-710-9633. As one superintendent told me, “We’re all first year teachers now, and we’d better be willing to learn from one another.”