Trickle-Down Technology: K-12's Tendency toward Slow Adoption Isn't All Bad. It Allows Schools to Draw from the Experiences of Colleges and Universities, Which Have Come to Function as a Proving Ground for Classroom Devices

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Care has to be taken when relating technology's use in college and university lecture halls to the way it s applied in K-12 classrooms. To some degree, what happens in higher ed stays in higher ed. Differences in pedagogy, learning styles, and even attendance can impact the way the respective students in the two environments consume technology, which in turn impacts the technology's effectiveness as a learning tool. higher education, for example, classes are large--some lectures can have as many as 200 students--and attendance is often not mandatory. Technology, as such, is viewed more as a utility than a perk. Consider online environments, which are used in colleges and universities more as a delivery mechanism for educational material rather than as a supplement. In higher education, when online learning became popular, it was a way to deliver a whole course in an online environment and add students without having to build more physical space, says Peggi Munkittrick, senior director of product strategy at Schoolwires, an online collaboration platform for school districts targeted at teachers, parents, students, and their surrounding communities. There is a business value to using technology in K-12. Technology is being used more to complement the face-to-face classroom instruction. A key distinction is that K-12 often plays reluctant latecomer to higher ed's aggressive early adopter. But that's not entirely a bad thing. It means that K-12 administrators can take from the experiences colleges and universities have acquired through their use of various tools, and then apply what has worked best, molding it to suit their needs. effect, higher ed has become a de facto laboratory for discovering the best uses of technology and its impact on the learning experience. Collaborative Interaction particular, collaboration tools that facilitate both online and face-to-face interaction are very popular in higher education, with myriad uses that can translate well to K-12. Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY, has been using an open source collaboration environment called Sakai for both instructional purposes and as a way to support collaboration at the college through faculty committees, student clubs, and student advisement. college has been working with a number of K-12 schools to implement the technology through a program called Project Greystone. Josh Baron, director of academic technology at Marist and the leader of Project Greystone, says the use of online collaborative technologies has moved into education partly to address the need for students to be comfortable working in the borderless marketplace that awaits them as adults. Familiarizing students with this new way of working is better done sooner than later. The speed at which these types of collaborative technologies are being used in the workspace force their introduction in K-12 in part [so students can] pick up technical skills, but primarily because collaborating in these environments is different from face-to-face, Baron says. important to understand how to work with diverse people in this kind of fashion online. It's not about learning how to press the buttons in a wiki; it's about collaborating to a productive outcome. As such, collaborative technology has moved toward true, synchronous interaction. ability to annotate documents simultaneously, brainstorm via chat, or view presentations as a group no matter what the time is or where the users are is pushing the use of collaborative tools in both higher ed--and now K-12--well beyond blogs and wikis, not to mention a world away from traditional teaching and learning methods. When you start using collaborative spaces, you start seeing things you never would see face-to-face, says Billie McConnell, executive director of the K-12 Digital Learning Institute at Christian University in Abilene, TX, which works with teachers to integrate technologies into the K-12 space (see Abilene Christian Draws the Line, page 30). …