Chapter 9: Changing Classroom Environments Through Effective use of Technology

Classroom environments in high-poverty schools often reflect instructional practices that do not adequately prepare students to perform well on standardized achievement tests or to achieve success in today’s hightech workforce. In this chapter, we discuss these issues by presenting data that reveal what typically happens in high-poverty classrooms with regard to the role of teachers, students, and technology. Next, we present our research from two state technology initiatives by introducing the integration models used by both programs, then showing how application of the models resulted in promising trends of changed classroom environments. Specifically, observation data from random visits to classrooms revealed that teachers with “integration model” training used significantly more student-centered, technology-supported strategies than teachers without the training. However, the trained teachers were observed implementing these strategies only rarely to occasionally. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of increasing technology integration to enhance student learning for teachers in high-risk schools.