Largely unexamined in the large-scale shift to digital learning in education are the accompanying ethical considerations. Indeed, the issues and tradeoffs that school leaders and teachers face in using technology in schools and for education — whether free or for a fee — are more complex than they have ever been. As Lisa Petrides and I write in a new op-ed for The Hechinger Report (“What’s the high-tech tradeoff for students and teachers?“):
In this new digital era for education, we should ask: What rules of the road are needed to ensure that decisions about technology are made in the best interests of students?
Among the places where our ‘rules of the road’ seem lacking, I’d count the following:
Access and use, which I define to include the myriad issues of equity of access, but also of our orientation toward student use of devices (i.e., are we teaching students to bend technology to their own goals – via coding or domains of their own – or to to merely dutifully click-through others’ software apps?)**
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