Featured Session IPE: Digital Innovation and Equity in Schools

While digital, participatory media are signaling cultural shifts in the ways students learn,
socialize, and create texts, much of the nation’s K-12 schooling system is still mired by
traditional educational practices. With significant shifts taking place in out-of-school learning,
this panel explores the ways that digital innovation can improve schooling by highlighting the
voices of teachers, students, administrators, and researchers currently working
in America’s schooling system.

Though the opportunity to leverage technology to improve the learning and life opportunities of
students is bigger than ever before, schools face significant challenges in leveraging technology
in an equitable, sustainable way. From teacher pedagogical preparation to school infrastructure
to school and research partnerships, crucial barriers stand in the way of wide-spread digital
innovation for schools. Couple these barriers with an achievement gap that cleaves educational
outcomes for students by race and class and the issue of digital media use in schools becomes
an imperative struggle of equity. As policy-makers look to digital technology as an antidote for
improving education for students, the challenges that schools face are best articulated by those
working and engaging within classrooms.

This panel brings together the viewpoints of various participants within schools to discuss
opportunities, challenges, and experience with digital innovation in schools. Teachers,
students, administrators, and researchers engage in dialogue about the role of digital
innovation in addressing educational equity. Finally, this panel welcomes a larger dialogue
with the audience about ways to foster and support digital innovation within formal schooling
environments in the K-16 and beyond schooling system. At stake are the learning, career,
and civic outcomes for students as a result of digital innovation.