Teachers in High-Poverty Schools Less Confident About Ed Tech, Survey Finds

Teachers who are most confident about educational technology tend to work in low-poverty and suburban schools, bringing their students a wide range of experiences and potential benefits that other young people may lack, concludes a survey released today by the Education Week Research Center. For example: These teachers are far more likely than their less-confident counterparts to report daily use of digital curricula, learning management systems, and parent communication tools. As a result, they report that their students spend roughly twice as much class time using digital tools than the students of teachers with less confidence around ed tech. These highly confident teachers also believe that their students are significantly better prepared to use technology for everything from independent research to collaboration on schoolwork via social media.

The findings come from an exclusive, not-statistically-representative survey of roughly 700 teachers. The finding that teachers who are least confident in educational technology tend to work in high-poverty and urban schools offers yet another reason to worry about the evolving "digital divide" in K-12. From access to high-speed Internet and devices to the ways technology is used and now to teachers' perceptions and practices around ed tech, researchers have consistently found urban and poor students to be at a disadvantage.