Measure the Effectiveness
of Your Digital Age Classrooms
AS I SEE “IT”
By Susan Poling
Susan Poling is the
technology coordinator for Shelby County
Schools in Alabama,
which serves 28,000
students. She has 20
years’ experience as a
district-level technology
coordinator and has
served as an officer for
the Alabama Education
Technology Association,
an ISTE affiliate.
If there is one thing that technologists and educators have in common, it is their propensity to create acronyms. From AYP
(adequate yearly progress) to RTI (response to
intervention), acronyms are born and evolve
faster than iPad clones. So we felt right at home
last year as we devised a measuring system for
the digital age classroom and christened it MI-
5, or the Multimedia Interactive Scale. Creating
the MI- 5 scale might seem like an elaborate
and envious reaction to districts that grab the
headlines when they somehow find funding
for one-to-one initiatives or install interactive whiteboards in every classroom in one fell
swoop. Maybe that was the impulse to create
it, but MI- 5 is more than just a complicated
measuring stick.
The scale uses six levels, from MI-0 to MI-
5, before reaching our state’s description of a
21st century classroom. In MI-0 classrooms,
teachers and students have no means of displaying digital work and multimedia. In MI- 1
classrooms, they can. This significant addition
enables the teacher to satisfy one of the digital
generation’s most ubiquitous preferences: obtaining information, at least initially, via images
and multimedia. As classrooms rise in MI level,
activities become more interactive and collaborative, and students gain more autonomy. In
the MI scale, equipment is secondary and variable. MI- 5 levels describe what can happen in
the room rather than what is in the room. The
devices or software used to make these activities possible can differ from room to room and
will certainly change over time.
The MI- 5 scale offers three main benefits:
• It encourages schools to focus their technology
plans on facilitating effective digital age learning and teaching rather than on the latest tech
gizmos.
• It has staying power. The committee won’t
be redesigning its definition of a 21st century
classroom every time new products, services,
or digital communities emerge.
• It enables us to measure and report on our
progress incrementally.
Charting this progress takes some extra effort. It
required us to analyze inventory data with if/then
statements. For instance, since last spring our percentage of MI-0 level classrooms dropped by 24%
because we added display devices to 355 classrooms.
At the same time, MI- 1 classrooms rose by 16%,
MI- 2 rose by 3%, MI- 3 gained 0.5%, MI- 4 increased
3.78%, MI- 5 dropped by 0.20%, and those that met
21st century status rose by 0.18%. Using percentages makes our progress more clear because we are
always adding new classrooms, whether through
portables or new construction.
In a recent report to our school board, the
MI scale made it easy to demonstrate that even
though less than 1% of our 1,800 classrooms are
“21st century” by the state’s definition, we are
making progress. The fact that we measure in
terms of facilitating effective learning and teaching rather than on “stuff” also helps to communicate our values to stakeholders.
I did caution board members that the MI- 5
scale was our creation, and no one else would
have a clue what it meant. But who knows,
maybe it will catch on.
