A national survey of 1,000 K-12 parents commissioned by The Learning Assembly has found that despite parents believing in the power of educational technology to support their child’s personalized learning needs, they don’t believe schools are adequately using EdTech to do so.

Though an overwhelming majority of parents (93 percent) believe that EdTech is a proven way to tailor instruction to meet individual student needs, only 1 in 3 think their school is doing an excellent job of doing this.

This mismatch in beliefs is an indication that additional training and support is needed to ensure that technology creates “meaningful, personalized learning experiences for every child,” said Phyllis Locket, CEO of LEAP innovations and Learning Assembly member.

Overall, parents indicated that they are only slightly familiar with how technology is being used in their child’s schools.

When asked “how good of a job has your child’s school done in explaining to you how technology . . . is used in school to support your child’s learning,” most parents said only a “fair" or “good" job. A minority of 8 percent of parents said their school did an "excellent" job.

On that same note, a majority of parents said they are only “fairly knowledgeable” when it comes to “the programs, apps and digital resources" their child uses in school for learning.

The survey revealed other interesting educational technology trends as seen through the eyes of the nation’s parents.

When it comes to parental engagement, for example, parents still say they primarily communicate with educators in-person. This is in spite of the influx of applications designed to take parental engagement to the digital level; only 3 percent of parents say they currently use apps to communicate with teachers.

All in all, the majority of parents support an increase of technology in schools regardless of not being totally in the know on how EdTech is used: 90 percent said they would support their child using more technology for learning.

Read the full survey here.

Nicole Gorman, Senior Education World Contributor

10/19/2016