SPEAK UP: Teachers and students won’t see eye-to-eye on everything, and the latest Speak Up Research Project for Digital Learning shows perspectives about edtech are no exception. In the report, which asked more than 514,000 educators, students and parents about trends in technology, nearly half of high school students said their teachers assign homework that requires internet access daily, while less than 10 percent of teachers said they did so. The survey also shows that almost 50 percent of the teachers said they rarely assign homework that requires internet, yet less than 10 percent of student respondents agreed.
The gap likely comes from teachers not taking into account that students often use the internet to help them with homework, even if assignments do not require online access. The report summary reads: “Few teachers say they regularly assign Internet-dependent homework, more principals think Internet-dependent homework is being assigned, but students say they regularly use the internet to help with homework.”
The report also gauges educators’ attitudes about how they select and use digital content. The most important marks of quality, respondents say, are that content is “fresh,” aligned to standards and modifiable by teachers. Whether or not the content is OER, apparently, is on the “least important” list.
