This is What's Wrong with Tech Articles

GreatSchools has an article about evaluating the effectiveness of technology in your child's school. Just like most such articles, it does not even question the assumption that technology should be used. The unexamined assumption is of course technology should be used. It is only a matter of whether it is being effectively used.

The assumption ignores two considerations. One, technology has always been used in schools. There are people still alive who remember the old mimeograph machines that produced odorous purple worksheets.

Language labs once used huge reel-to-reel tape players.

There are people who remember helping their teacher carefully thread the filmstrip projector.

Eventually, the the projector gave way to VHS tapes which finally gave way to You-tube videos projected from flash drives.

The point is there is no stopping technology. Which brings us to the second consideration. Back in those days, there were no articles discussing whether technology was effective or not. Technology was a tool, but not a panecea. We had not yet mentally endowed technology with mythological superpowers. Technology was not "a thing." Today, technology is a bandwagon to jump on merely for technology's sake. Tech for tech's sake is expensive and unnecessary.

"Research shows these (smart) boards can increase both student interest and participation," (but this does not necessarily translate to increased understanding or achievement, especially if it doesn't) "change the dynamic of the classroom...Because it’s the teaching practices associated with technology use that matter most.”

We Don't Need Educational Bells and Whistles

Among the many reasons education reform is stalled, one of the most prominent must be the appeal of adding bells and whistles to a broken-down car. A case in point is adding social media to schools. Social media plays into the myth that we can improve education by merely incorporating technology. People (somewhere, sometime) have received excellent educations for millenia even without any of what we recognize today as technology.

I once taught math to a group of multi-generational Vietnamese refugees. The experience changed my entire outlook on the subject of school finances. We sat under the trees. Everybody had a lapboard, pencils and paper I provided. I had the only textbook, a small chalkboard, chalk and eraser, all of which I also provided, and any “manipulatives” I chose to bring. Even on such a shoestring, I guarantee I delivered a high-quality education experience to all. No “technology,” not even a calculator. Amazing, huh.

Would it have been nice to have an overhead projector, or a smart board? Sure, but not necessary. How about a mimeograph machine, a xerox machine, computer printouts? Also lovely, but the students were perfectly capable of copying the problems from my little blackboard. Filmstrips, videos, DVDs? Again, nice, but not essential.

If our education system is like a car whose engine does not run, adding technology is like hoping that plugging in a GPS will somehow cause the engine to turn over. Incorporating bells and whistles like Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Second Life, whatever, will not help. The car is still going nowhere.

Analogies always break down somewhere. Our education system is not really like a single car. It is more like a bunch of scooters, some of which run nicely and some do not run at all. The kids on the scooters that run may be doing fine, but if America is to compete, all the scooters need to run nicely. Once all the scooters are running well, we can add a roof to the scooters and enhance the experience for all. Again, adding a roof to a non-running scooter will not make it run.

Before we begin spending tons of money on enhancements like technology, we need to use whatever resources we have to ensure every child is receiving a high quality education. Funny thing, money is no object, nor is it an obstacle. It is a matter of where we, as a society, place our priorities. As Suze Orman's signature line puts it, people first, then things.

Smart Phones, Or Why Teachers Resent Education Research

It is not that teachers resent all research. But an extended advertisement posing as research? Or administrators mandating teachers implement new “researched-based” practices? Or research with questionable conclusions? Or research that ignores the day-to-day concerns of teachers? Or research on new ways to teacher-proof the curriculum?

Qualcomm funded a grant to provide smart phones to 100 ninth graders in North Carolina for algebra study. Guess what, the study found that smart phones aided algebra learning. So let's all run out and get smart phones for the kids.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Digital Millennial Consulting and Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), a leading developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies and data solutions, today announced the joint distribution of 100 Smartphones to four high schools in three school districts across the state of North Carolina.

The thing is these smart phones are little different from the ones in the store.

MobiControl enables teacher and administrators to restrict students from using the voice capabilities and instant messaging capabilities of the phone during primary instructional time.  Additionally, the devices route all requests for access to external Web sites via a Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) compliant content filter.  Finally, all text-based communication through the closed social networking system are monitored to ensure appropriate use.  Students also are required to attend a training session related to an acceptable use policy under which a zero tolerance policy will be applied.  


...

Students are only given access rights to communicate with individuals participating within Project K-Nect.  Other social networking sites are blocked and all text based communication is monitored.  

Well, that's a relief. The Qualcomm smart phones are not exactly smart phones.

Okay, what, exactly, did students do with their student-safe smart phones that helped them learn algebra? According to an EdWeek report,

Students, some initially skeptical that a phone would help them do better in math, have been quick to embrace the idea of using the mobile device to learn, says Denton, who attends Dixon High School in the 24,000-student Onslow County, N.C., schools.
“At first, I was trying to figure out how a phone was going to help me with math,” she says. “I didn’t see a connection.”

But Denton, who started in the program with Algebra 1 and has since taken geometry and is now taking Algebra 2 through Project K-Nect, says she and her classmates soon saw many advantages provided by the phone, particularly being able to get help at any hour and using instructional videos for assistance.

So the main advantage of the smart phones were their Internet capabilities.

However the learning curve seems a little steep.

Intensive training for teachers—at least nine hours—is essential, says Gross, the technology consultant. Students need about four to six hours of training, he says.

It is not really the smart phones that made the difference. It is the way these customized smart phones address the digital divide, a modern incarnation of the old SES (socio-economic status) divide.

A 2005 Pew report defines the digital divide in terms of Internet access at home, and the differences are dramatic. Individuals in higher-income households are more likely to go online (93% access) and more likely to have high-speed connections (71%) that households with incomes below $30,000, where 49% have access and just 23% have high-speed connections.
 
The digital divide is significant by race as well, even when income levels are comparable. Both home computer use and home Internet access was 13% to 18% greater for Whites in lower-income brackets than for Blacks in the same income brackets.
 
Studies identifying this digital divide brought attention to these disparities in learning opportunities facing students already at high risk for academic failure. To address these disparities, the federal e-rate program was developed to invest public funds into hardwiring public schools for computer and Internet access. The result is that computers and Internet access are available in our schools. What hasn’t changed is that the digital divide continues after school hours, when children go home.
 
Once students in our country’s poorest families go home, they lose an important learning advantage, slipping further behind students who can extend their learning day into their home. The problem shifts from concerns about technical access to concerns about digital participation.

Smart phones are uniquely poised to address the digital divide because the target at-risk population already possesses cell phones.

A recent report released by NOP World Technology highlights cell phone penetration rates in the United States.
 
- 73% of 18 year olds have cell phones, a 15% increase from 2002 to 2004.
- 75% of 15 to17 year olds have cell phones, up 33% from 2004 to 2005.
- 40% of 12 to14 year olds have cell phones, up 27% from 2002 to 2004.
 

The main idea is to take a technology that has already crossed the digital divide and use it to give lower SES students access to resources that higher SES students already have.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that the smart phones are only as helpful as the Internet link. Some math links are wonderful, replete with clear explanations and videos that can help older students visualize the math concepts. Some math links are poor, incoherently designed, or procedure-based explanations. Perhaps before schools spend a lot of money on customized smart phones, they should check their records and see how many students have email. Presumably, if they have email, they have a way to access it. If they can access their email, they can use the Internet. Those students would not need smart phones.

In 2005, 75% of fifteen-year-olds had cellphones. How many have cellphones in 2010? Probably more than 75%. How many of those cell phones are Internet capable? Probably most of them. The Qualcomm study is but the most recent example of education research that only refreshes teacher mistrust of such research.

Expensive Useless Education Technology

While preparing a post on state-of-the-art language labs in schools, I came across this piece about interactive white boards (IWB). Our society is so enchanted by technology. If you are a grant writer, you know that nearly every request for proposal (RFP) wants a technology piece. If it is not there, the proposal will not be funded. Thus, otherwise excellent proposals are encumbered by unnecessary, and often useless components that add expense without clear benefit.

Seen as the first step towards “21st century teaching and learning,” schools and districts run out and spend thousands of dollars on these gizmos, hanging them on walls and showing them off like proud hens that just laid the golden instructional egg...without time and training, they quickly become nothing more than really expensive overhead projectors.

Back in the 1980s, when my high school decided to buy a state-of-art language lab from Sony, they sent me on an expensive trip to Tokyo to learn how to use it. My job was to come back and teach everyone else. I was also tasked with creating language lab materials to supplement the textbooks and providing the voice for the materials.

I loved my fancy-dancy language lab. I used it all the time and enthusiastically taught my colleagues how to use it. They ignored it. Eventually, the administration, worried about the evident waste of money, decreed that all language teachers must utilize the lab at least once a month. So they did, turning it into a very expensive cassette tape player. Me, I had a blast designing all kinds of innovative ways to use the lab.

Is the interactive whiteboard nothing more than a fancy accessory to much-maligned “stand and deliver instruction.” Personally, I do not have a problem with stand and deliver instruction. Well-delivered direct instruction is highly effective.

Adminstrators worry about utilization, but not so much about effectiveness.

...schools rarely have any kind of system in place to evaluate the impact that whiteboards are having on instruction. We spend heaping piles of cash collecting whiz-bang gadgets and then completely fail to reflect on whether or not they have helped us achieve the outcomes we most desire.

On the other hand, it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of any technology when it is rarely used or used as expensive replacements for other equipment like overhead projects or cassette players. Even technology that has been around for decades is not well-correlated with academic achievement.*

On the other, other hand, maybe effectiveness is not the salient consideration.

Frankly, it seems like most school leaders don’t really care whether IWBs change instruction in meaningful ways in their school’s classrooms. Why? Because whiteboards aren’t an instructional tool in their eyes. They’re a PR tool—a tangible representation of innovation that can be shown off to supervisors and parents alike.

Yep, that described my language lab. I was constantly pressed to show it off to school visitors.

Yet in the past, I often wistfully wished there was a way to save a chalkboard...or a way to project an internet page...or …

Today, I think I could find a lot of great ways to use an interactive white board, but I still question whether it is the gizmo or the instructional design that accounts for any improvement in academic achievement. Actually, I do not question at all. Of course, instructional design wins hands down. I would like all schools to be able to have the technology to augment great instructional design, but as long as schools are complaining of tight budgets and laying off teachers, I would prefer they spend scarce dollars on people rather than things. I would prefer to see schools set priorities more profound than keeping up with the Joneses.

Roxanne Elden has expressed well educators' frustration in her open letter to Educational Technology. I suggest linking to the original article and reading the comments to find out what an admittedly nonrandom cross-section of teachers think about interactive whiteboards. Often their comments can be applied to education technology in general.

*Go here to find out how to obtain a comprehensive report on calculator research with our youngest students.

Cellphones the New Calculators?

Dear ---,

As I understand your research proposal, it sounds like you are collecting an anthology of ways to use the IPhone as an instructional instrument.

The current cell-phone-as-tool-of-instruction discussion reminds me very much of similar discussions when calculators became ubiquitous.  Oh, lookie, lookie, we can play games and we can make upside-down words. First graders will learn place value and regrouping as they do +1 over and over watching the changes in display. We will even be able to teach chaos theory in the fourth grade.  The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics went so far as to recommend calculator use with first graders as part of their standards, but later qualified the recommendation with the words "under the guidance of a skilled math teacher."

I have compiled an extensive review of the literature on calculator use with our youngest students. The most generous conclusion is that at best calculators do no harm.  "At best" is not good enough.  The games, clever tricks and so on have not lived up to the claims. 

I am concerned we are repeating the same mistake with cellphones.  It seems you have already decided cellphones have educational potential.  Researchers are not supposed to pre-decide.  If you are assuming that cellphones will be of positive use in the classroom, then you might be laboring under an unexamined assumption.  Unexamined assumptions are often fatal flaws in research. Even professional researchers are not immune.   Another unexamined assumption I often encounter regarding cellphones is the idea that since the kids have them anyway, we might as well figure how to make use of them. However, some schools require the students to check their cell phones at the door. Or some parents exercise their parental right to deny cellphones to their children. Schools even now experience difficulty when they assume that each and every child has independent internet access at home.

It seems to me that your research topic is a worthy one, but that perhaps you should focus on designing a research study that may contribute the necessary knowledge preliminary to collecting ideas such as the one about ELL students animating their vocabulary words.

As a college professor, I do not worry too much about students having cell phones except that I expect them to be turned off in class.  If they are surreptitiously texting or playing games in their laps, and miss stuff that might show up, oh I don't know, on the midterm, that is their responsibility and they must face their own consequences.  After all, they are adults. But I worry about our responsibility to minor students.

I just finished teaching in a summer program for 4-8 grades.  They all had cell phones.  The program director had told them to turn off their cell phones during "class" but most ignored his request.  After all this wasn't school they reasoned, sometimes out loud.  They were constantly texting and playing games in their laps, and then complained that they did not get very much out of the summer program.  Parents were not happy either and thought we teachers should have disciplined their children more strictly.  Some teachers actually did discipline children, but those children often dropped the "class" of the "mean" teacher the very next day, and transferred to another "class."  Some classes escaped this problem entirely.  I mean, it is pretty hard to text and do woodworking, karate, or swimming at the same time. :-)

Good luck with your thesis.

The Education Train May Have Left the Station

The education train may have left the station, leaving traditional educators still groping their way blindly to the platform.

New, innovative, non-educators are poised to blaze the new education trails needed to help America reclaim its status as the world class education system. These new style educators usually have not earned education degrees, have not taught school, and do not possess any state teaching licenses. All that stuff is so last century. Nevertheless, they may be at the forefront of the education reform so many of us yearn for.

I am not talking about technology, a relatively recent buzzword near and dear to education writers and grant-funding foundations. A Request for Proposal without a technology piece is getting pretty rare. However, technology is often nothing more than gussied-up drill-and-kill.

The people currently studying the dynamics of learning are not necessarily publishing in journals, but they are implementing what they learn in domains outside of traditional education settings. Second Life just held its first commencement ceremony honoring virtual students who earned degrees entirely in the virtual world. Talk about online education. I just want to know if the real person behind the Second Life avatar has acquired real-life marketable skills. I mean if the avatar had to complete assignments and pass tests to earn a virtual degree, is it possible the person behind the avatar acquired that knowledge. And if not, could the concept be designed so that the puppetmaster, so to speak, does acquire the puppet's skills? Intriguing.

The government has commissioned Visual Purple to create training simulations that put participants in decision-making roles to maximize learning by doing. Robert Kiyosaki, of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame, has a game, The CashFlow Game, out to help people master his strategies and tactics. The idea behind these simulations is the the puppet represents the puppetmaster, and the puppetmaster must learn and integrate knowledge and skills in order for the puppet to succeed. The acquired knowledge and skills is then directly useful in real life work.

So am I just talking about games and simulations? No. Games and simulations are nothing new. I used Reader Rabbit, Oregon Trail, Operation Frog, Sim Ant, and other programs with positive effects many, many years ago. But those programs were supplemental to my main teaching agenda, and compared with some of the new developments, frankly clumsy and primitive. With a well-designed curriculum, some of the new games can BE the teaching environment.

To be clear, I am NOT saying you have to subscribe to the opinions of any of the purveyors of games and simulations. I AM saying that Confucius was right. The amount remembered depends on the level of processing. The simulations seek to maximize learning at the active, 90% level.

The Limits of Educational Software

So if you control for the variables you know help students achieve, your study of (fill in the blank) shows no significant gain due to (fill in the blank). In this case the blank is filled by the darling of grant funders everywhere, technology, specifically education delivered by computers.

For the second year in a row, a controversial $14.4 million federal study testing the effectiveness of reading and math software programs has found few significant learning differences between students who used the technology and those taught using other methods.
...snip...
“These studies are intended to wash out all the variation in school environments, teacher quality, resources­—all the things that we, in fact, know make a difference when it comes to student learning,” said Margaret A. Honey, a technology expert who is the president of the New York Hall of Science.

In other words, students who do well with the educational software were doing well anyway, probably because of the school environment or teacher quality or other known predictor of student achievement.

Technology is way over-rated. Consider the mathematical concept of place value. Teachers can design an activity that involves students boxing objects into groups of ten, and then packing ten boxes into a case, then stacking ten cases on a crate. I have such an activity with pinto beans. Students keep a columnar tally as they fill each “box” with beans. One rule of the game is that there can be no partially filled boxes, cases, or crates.

Subtraction is modeled with the same manipulatives. Students must often unpack a crate or a case or a box do complete the subtraction. If, for example, students must open a case in order to subtract boxes, they must empty the case entirely and stack all ten boxes with however many full boxes they already have, all the while keeping a columnar tally. If students have 2 crates, 4 cases, 3 boxes and 6 loose beans and want to “fill an order” (subtract) 4 boxes, they must empty a case. Now they have 2 crates, 3 cases, 13 boxes and 6 loose beans. We do not worry about conforming to the standard algorithm when we model on paper the actual mathematics of the task.

I once had a group of education students do the same activity on computer using a Java applet. Among other features, the applet used a rope tool to surround 10 loose objects and a box tool to pack into full boxes. I asked the students to compare the educational soundness of each activity. They quickly observed the “magical” aspect of the computer version. The concrete activity was real. Students could easily see how boxes were filled because they physically filled the boxes. The computer converted a lassoed group of objects to a box by some mystical means. At least, it may seem mystical to a child of the target age group.

Computers compromise sensory experience. No matter how 3D the graphics, the display is essentially two dimensional relying almost exclusively on the visual. Brain scientists might say the concrete activity forms more neural pathways by utilizing more of the five senses.

Paradoxically, some computer animation looks amazingly real. I often wonder how unhealthy a reliance on computers might be. At least in the days of Captain Kangaroo, small children could easily distinguish the real from the unreal. At a age when children are known to confuse reality and fantasy, can it really be a good idea to deliberately smudge the line between the two? Could computer animation undermine the development of analytical ability when the child's own senses cannot be trusted? When painted pictures of squirrels on cardboard placard danced around on Captain Kangaroo, no child was led to conclude that squirrels actually do hip-hop. The cardboard squirrel was obviously unreal. Can the same be said for the squirrel in the famous commercial doing a fist pump after causing a car accident? Will our children think less critically and be more vulnerable to scams?

Technology has Betrayed Education

Technology was supposed to revolutionize education. Schools went for technology in a big way. Technology, for most schools, meant computers. Apple gave a boatload of computers to schools all over the country. Administrators contracted professional development training in technology for practicing teachers. Colleges of education created technology courses for teaching candidates, first as electives, and eventually as requirements, in many certification programs. Foundations began mandating a technology component in grant proposals as a condition for receiving funding. Society expected schools to provide computers either in stand-alone computer labs or in classrooms. Virtually every school in America has computers available for student use.

Background

Schools have computers and they have been using them. A few schools got on the computer bandwagon early, in the 1980's, when the first widely available computers stored data on cassette tapes. By the 1990's, a whole generation of primary children grew up with DOS-based programs like Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail. A program called Operation Frog was a great help in teaching my junior high students anatomy and allowing them to virtually not only dissect a frog, but put it back together again.

It has been over a quarter century, and now we know computers were not the panacea everyone expected. Why would we have thought they could be? Common sense tells us that people have achieved high levels of academic achievement for hundreds, even thousands, of years, long before computers were invented. There is a school, Waldorf , dedicated to the proposition that computers are not only not necessary, but also potentially detrimental.

In the late 1990's, I judged a science fair that led me to agree with Waldorf. Most of the judges were mothers who may or may not have understood the judging criteria. Nearly all the projects were prepared with a computer; a number were nothing more than cut and paste jobs from Internet sources. One submission stood out. Prepared by a Waldorf student, it looked like a project from the 1960's. It was a beautifully hand-colored project about the solar system. According to the evaluations, most of the judges down-rated the project because it did not possess the glitzy appearance that computer graphics and typefaces gave all the other projects. The actual content, the quality of the research and written text, meant nothing.

Issues

Undoubtedly, there are teachers who have exploited the potential of computers to enhance students' educational experience and achievement. But in general, computers have been less than helpful:
1. Computers are handy for keeping disruptive students occupied and out of trouble.
2. Computers are overused for drill and kill.
3. Learning to read on computers is not the same as learning to read the printed page. Eyes scan a screen differently than they scan a printed page. Distance issues and posture problems (see photo bottom of page 10) with the neck are also evident.

4. Digital math manipulatives are unclear. The transformations seem too magical and often fail to communicate the mathematical process.
5. The focus of education has shifted from knowledge and applications of knowledge to information access. We have often heard that that the important thing is finding information, not knowing information.
a) Students no longer need to know their math facts—just pull out the calculator. However, students often fail to evaluate the reasonableness of a calculator answer. Furthermore, even at the college level, students use the calculator for trivial math. I did an experiment with a math class recently where I allowed them to freely use calculators for a test. I walked around and watched their inputs. It was surprising how many felt the necessity to input calculations like -2+1. Some of them complained that they did not have enough class time to finish the test.
b) Students often do not have enough knowledge to figure out what search terms they should use to find more information on a given topic. Worse, they frequently cannot evaluate the credibility of web sites.
c) Students fail to use the Internet to find or confirm knowledge when they need it. They frequently believe they already know enough. They take these habits into adulthood. A good example are the numbers of young people who got into predatory mortgages by relying on the representations of the loan officer. Famous last words: So and so told me....
6. For a while spelling went out the window as students whined, “Why do I need to learn to spell? the computer can spellcheck.” Email could not even spellcheck for a long time.
7. Students are not learning to create complete presentations; they merely read their PowerPoint slides.
8. Students are developing little tolerance for teachers who use “old” technology like overhead projectors, or no technology like blackboards or whiteboards, believing their education is somehow being shortchanged by the absence of current technology. Such a misplaced belief can contribute to student bad behavior.
9. More examples?


Positive Uses

Nevertheless, computers can be used positively in schools:
1. Computers can be used to teach computers. Most employers want employees to be able to use at least the Microsoft software, Word, Excel and sometimes PowerPoint. Everyone should know how to use a word processor and be able to find and evaluate information on the Internet. Some employers expect employees to use other commercially available programs like QuickBooks and/or be computer savvy enough to quickly master a proprietary program like Raintree for medical offices.
2. Computers can be used to train and enhance certain skills students are already using. In the work world, employees train with Computer Based Training (CBT) wherein they develop skills they are using everyday. The software is integrated with what students are actually doing rather than teaching them to do something they may or may not do.


Actually Nos. 1 and 2 go together. Learning to use the computer to produce a useful project and actually not only complete the project but use the skills ever after. In the early 1990's, I taught math, science, and computer to junior high students. I fully integrated all three subjects, rearranging the math and science curriculum to enhance each other and teaching students to use the computer to, for example, produce data tables and lab reports. In those days, the computers in my school did not have the Internet. Anybody remember those days?

Computers are an important tool in modern life, but they are only tools. Technology can only supplement fundamentally sound education, not produce such an education.

The Misplaced Fascination with Technology

Educators are fascinated with technology, particularly calculators. Randall Charles, in the May/June 1999 issue of Math Education Dialogues published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (page 11), is sure that not using calculators in the elementary grades “is almost certain to lead to the development of habits that are counter productive to the development of number sense, problem solving and positive dispositions.” In the same publication, Anthony Ralston suggested abolishing pencil-and-paper arithmetic, implying that American students will continue to fare poorly in international comparisons until we do.

However, from the naive student's point of view, technology often looks more like magic than anything else. For example, a popular software program called Geometer's Sketchpad claims that you can know a square is really a square if you drag a corner with the mouse, and while expanding and contracting it maintains the shape of a square. There are two problems here: circular reasoning and dependence on appearance to draw mathematical conclusions. Then students are presented with two apparent squares. When you drag on a corner of the first square it indeed only expands or contracts. When you drag on a corner of the second square, it transforms into any number of other quadrilaterals of varying shapes with varying lengths of sides. The second square is obviously not a “real” square. However, the essential difference between the two original apparent squares does not reside in the properties of squares but in software code. The computer code (written by some programmer) makes the first square expand and contract, while maintaining its square-looking shape. Different computer code makes the second square wildly transform itself. From the student's point of view it was all magical. Magical and mystical mathematical processes do not promote solid math reasoning ability.

A few years ago I challenged the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) on two occasions six months apart to provide me with a list of the research studies they claimed supported their recommendation on page 78 of the Principles and Standards published in 2000 that even the youngest children should learn to use calculators. Their publications and press releases often asserted that calculators promote mathematics reasoning among the youngest students. NCTM was unable to provide the list on either occasion. I conducted my own diligent search. I found that the most that could be concluded from the research was that calculators could not be positively shown to promote the acquisition of mathematical reasoning skills in our youngest students.

Funny thing—generations of students the world over managed to acquire mathematical reasoning skills in the hundreds of years before calculators and other fascinating technologies were ever invented. Technology is not necessary. It might be nice but any specific technological tool needs to be strictly evaluated and well chosen by elementary teachers skilled in the teaching of mathematics.