As educators, you've sensed that technology has a positive impact on student learning and on your teaching, but there's been precious little research to back that up. Finally, there's primary research on the relationships between effectiveness, achievement, attitude, and the use of technology in schools. There's excellent research about what school districts across the U.S. are doing with technology. And there's a new report linking professional development in technology to better learning. The specific student population, the software design, the educator's role, student groupings, the preparedness of the educator, and the level of student access to the technology influence the level of effectiveness of educational technology.
Educators are an essential element in the effectiveness of technology.
Software is effective because it allows individual learner traits to be taken into consideration when software is being designed and used. Effectiveness of educational technology depends on a match between the goals of instruction, characteristics of the learners, the design of the software and technology implementation decisions made by educators. Students of teachers with more than 10 hours of training significantly out-performed students of teachers with 5 or fewer training hours. Over the past several years, a growing number of national organizations have focused on ways to help schools improve technology training for teachers. The CEO Forum is one of the groups at the forefront of these efforts.