ABSTRACT
The lack of access to digital technology is a challenge for both Catholic and public schools alike. Though they are often overlooked, Catholic schools represent a global system that educates more than 60 million children annually, many of whom reside in low-income neighbourhoods without sufficient access to digital technologies. Catholic schools themselves also typically lag behind their local public school counterparts in the number of devices available per student.
Curiously, though, one urban Catholic school in the midwestern United States that had recently won a large technology grant actually ‘misplaced’ carts of recently purchased Chromebooks. This school, like many others throughout the US, invested in technology and introduced it into the classroom environment, only to have teachers and administrators mothball these costly devices and scuttle ambitious plans when they quickly found them to be a distraction and hindrance to learning rather than the pedagogical panacea that their grant proposal envisioned. This example represents a new type of barrier for student access to technology: an in-school barrier that bans the use of devices, primarily because they were purchased without a specific purpose in mind.
This chapter chronicles the way the aforementioned school was able to engage students in meaningful uses of technology through a blended-learning approach. This approach utilizes adaptive computer programs to put differentiated digital content in the hands of students and actionable data in the hands of teachers. The result was a staggering increase in literacy (+33% of students on or above grade level) and numeracy (+55% of students on or above grade level) in one year of meaningfully using previously derelict technology.
