Kids enter ‘a whole new world’ as teachers use technology to help address inequity in schools

Eleven-year-old Graham Young is proud to have gotten 100% on a recent book report and is excited about the poster he just made to advertise his fledgling lawnmowing business in his neighborhood.

But what really puts a sparkle in his eyes and turns a shy smile into a wide grin? He did it all himself. With a neurological condition that makes him unable to read or write, Graham has been using tools such as Immersive Reader and the Windows speech-to-text feature over the past year to help him fully participate both in and out of school.

Whether it’s neurodiversity, physical disabilities or the challenges of poverty, teachers like Graham’s are finding that tech tools can be used as leveling blocks to help address many different kinds of inequity in schools. The new edition of the Windows 11 operating system, Windows 11 SE, and the lower-cost devices it supports, such as the Surface Laptop SE and others from Microsoft partners, join a range of learning technology aimed at helping educators give students the individualized support they need to succeed.

“We have a better understanding of the potential and limitations of technology than we ever had before,” says Joseph South, chief learning officer for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). “We’ve pushed what it can do and scaled it more than we ever have, and that’s given us new insights.”

One of those insights is the importance of high-quality tools.

All 340 students at Aberdeen High School in rural Mississippi — a school that gets supplemental federal funds because of high levels of poverty — were given web-based devices when the pandemic hit last year. But those proved ineffective without home internet access, which about half of the students and even many teachers didn’t have.

And Major Allen Williams, who had just taken charge of the Junior ROTC program there, quickly discovered that even when they were online, the laptops didn’t have enough computing power for the advanced-placement computer science courses and e-sports teams he had created.

But Williams fights fiercely for his school, where he says nearly all of the students are Black and two-thirds are girls facing “inequities that are the same old story throughout our society where women and girls aren’t promoted, especially where technology careers are concerned.” So the Mississippi native and 25-year U.S. Air Force veteran quickly obtained a grant for two dozen Dell laptops that are powerful enough for all of the robust apps required for his classes and that give students experience with the Windows operating system and Microsoft 365 software they’re most likely to use in later jobs.

Now one of his students has started college — pursuing a career in tech that she’d never considered before — and this year another high school senior and three juniors are following in her path.

“You have to practice the way you’re going to play,” Williams says. “We have to train our kids in an environment like they will encounter when they go into the workforce.

“Too many times we don’t have high enough expectations of our kids. But when we raise the expectations and raise the capacity within the institution to provide the tools to meet those expectations, these kids blow it out of the water.”

Students in rural areas in particular can be left out if there’s no German language or advanced-math teachers available, for example, but tech tools now offer “possibilities beyond your classroom or the limits of your town,” South says. “Technology provides robust access to high-quality resources — educators, expertise, opportunities — that transcends geography, which for most of us is only a few miles wide where we live, work and go to school.”

Wichita Public Schools in Kansas began creating virtual field trips called “Edventures” during the pandemic that are providing rich experiences for many kids — including those who might not have been able to take actual trips for physical or financial reasons. Dyane Smokorowski, the school district’s coordinator of digital literacy, networked to find museums, companies, authors, actors and teachers to help her pull off 330 such events last schoolyear and about 30 so far this schoolyear.

She aligns the Edventures to the content kids are studying in each grade and makes them free to anyone, hosting as many as 10,000 students at a time through Microsoft Teams Live Events.

In October, for example, fifth graders studying the steps into the American Revolution got to interview an actor who played the role of a tavern keeper in 1775 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, using artifacts to paint the picture of life for kids in that era. Fourth graders studying biodiversity got a virtual lobster-boat experience, learning how Maine’s aquaculture differs from the agriculture of their landlocked state.