Ryan Cain

The COVID-19 pandemic's shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) revealed significant gaps in K-12 teachers' preparedness to use educational technology (ET) outside traditional settings. This study explores ET usage among Utah's K-12 teachers in 2021, focusing on tool prevalence, differences between elementary and secondary educators, and variations by educational attainment. A survey of 5,934 teachers resulted in 902 responses. Findings indicate that while traditional tools like printers and projectors were widely used, newer technologies such as Canvas and Zoom became essential. Some differences also emerged between groups. The study highlights the need for comprehensive ET training to prepare teachers for diverse instructional environments and informs recommendations for teacher preparation and professional development programs.

In March 2020, the global health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic brought about significant changes in classrooms around the world. This paper is part of a larger study that investigated how Utah teachers across the state adapted to technology integration during that period. Specifically, we present interview findings from ten teachers in Utah, which we analyzed using open and axial coding. The study identified four distinct challenges that teachers faced at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak: increased stress, difficulties in transitioning to digital formats, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) dissonance, and students’ lack of technological knowledge. As a result, teachers began to reassess their pedagogical approaches and incorporate greater care for themselves and their students. In terms of technology, teachers reported an increased willingness to utilize technology and videoconferencing, as well as a shift toward digital formats and platforms.

Professional development (PD) programs do not always reach the teacher or allow for sustained usage of technology. However, recent studies show that teachers are more open to use technology after increased technology dependence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Motivated by that new openness to technology integration, we used interview and survey data to examine teachers’ current practices for learning technology, features of PD that they consider effective and technologies that they want to learn in the future. We found that teachers learn technology in both formal and informal ways, through district-organized PD, independent learning and or by asking for help from peers. We also learned what kinds of technologies teachers want to learn more about, and that active learning and lack of cognitive overload are two of the most important features of PD for teachers in our study. Based on those findings, we offer three concrete recommendations for PD program designers.

Given growing interest in K-12 data and data science education, new approaches are needed to help students develop robust understandings of and familiarity with data. The model of the quantified self—in which data about one’s own activities are collected and made into objects of study—provides inspiration for one such approach. By drawing on what one already knows about their self and their prior experiences, it may be possible to bootstrap students’ abilities to interpret and make sense of data. Taking that possibility seriously, this article describes some of the gains observed in students’ statistical reasoning following a quantified self, wearables-based elementary statistics unit and provides a theoretical framework drawing from cognitive psychology, embodiment, and situative perspectives to characterize how prior experience is used as a resource in data sense-making when the data are about students’ own physical experiences. This framework centralizes and interrogates the work of “remembering” prior experiences and articulates how remembering is involved in interpreting quantified self data. Specifically, the framework emphasizes that remembering in service of data interpretation is a reconstructive act that draws from both general and specific embodied resources and that the work of reconstructive remembering in the classroom is both individual and multi-participant work. To demonstrate measured learning gains and illustrate the framework, written assessment results and descriptive cases of student and teacher discussions about quantified self data from two sixth-grade classes participating in a classroom design experiment are provided. Both a discussion of and recommendations for ethical considerations related to quantified self data in education are also provided.

Wearable technologies represent a rapidly expanding category of consumer information and communications technologies. From smartwatches to activity tracking devices, wearables are finding their way into many aspects of our lives, changing the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. The rapid adoption of these tools in everyday life hints at the possibilities these devices may hold in school and other educational settings. Drawing on examples taken from a five-year study using wearable fitness tracking devices in elementary and middle school classrooms, this paper presents two examples of how wearable devices can be appropriated for use in school settings. These examples focus on instances where students turned activity trackers into objects of inquiry using data from familiar activities.

In this paper, we describe a new approach for exploring individual participants' engagement in youth maker activities. Participants were outfitted with wearable first person point-of-view still-image cameras and wrist-based electrodermal sensors. The researchers analyzed the recorded electrodermal data stream for surges in skin conductivity and compared them with the corresponding photographs based on their time-stamp. In following with prior work, these surges were interpreted as moments of engagement. A comparison sample was created to look at moments that lacked this psychophysiological marker. Results indicated that the two participants had both shared and divergent engagement with activities such as soldering, assembling, and programming.

In large part due to the highly prescribed nature of the typical school day for children, efforts to design new interactions with technology have often focused on less-structured after-school clubs and other out-of-school environments. We argue that while the school day imposes serious restrictions, school routines can and should be opportunistically leveraged by designers and by youth. Specifically, wearable activity tracking devices open some new avenues for opportunistic collection of and reflection on data from the school day. To demonstrate this, we present two cases from an elementary statistics classroom unit we designed that intentionally integrated wearable activity trackers and child-created data visualizations. The first case involves a group of students comparing favored recess activities to determine which was more physically demanding. The second case is of a student who took advantage of her knowledge of teachers' school day routines to test the reliability of a Fitbit activity tracker against a commercial mobile app.

This paper reports on the results of several geotechnical engineering-related science activities conducted with elementary-school students. Activities presented include soil permeability, contact stress, soil stratigraphy, shallow and deep foundations, and erosion in rivers. The permeability activity employed the LEGO NXT platform for data acquisition, the soil profile and foundations activity employed natural and transparent soils as well as LEGO-based foundation models, and the erosion activity utilised a 3D printer to assist with construction of building models. The activities seek to enhance students’ academic achievement, excite them about geotechnical engineering, and motivate them to study science and math. Pre- and post-activity evaluations were conducted to assess both the suitability of the activities and the students’ learning. Initial results show that students gain a reasonable understanding of engineering principles. Moreover, the geotechnical engineering activities provided students an opportunity to apply their math skills and science knowledge.