Liz Kolb: Greetings, my name is Liz Kolb. And I am the creator of the Triple E Framework. And I am a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Education, where I get to work with pre-service and in-service teachers on using technology in their teaching and learning, as well as administrators and tech coaches. And I developed the Triple E Framework around 2011. Took me a few years and a little bit of time and research.

But I developed this framework because of my experiences in the classrooms and observing classroom use of technology. I spent some time, when I was doing my dissertation and my doctoral work, observing classrooms, mostly classrooms in schools that had gone one-to-one. And what I found was that a lot of schools that were one-to-one were using the technology. But they were using it in a very artificial, kind of, shallow way. There was a lot of focus on gaming, a lot of using applications where students were not actually really getting a lot of learning out of it. They were having fun.

But they were more focused on things like rewards than they were on the actual content learning. And teachers seemed to focus a lot on the behavioral engagement of students rather than the actual cognitive engagement of students in the learning goals. And so I realized that a lot of the technology use that was happening wasn't really the kind of engagement that we wanted to see. It wasn't this authentic engagement. It was much more of, kind of, a shallow, students are behaving, and they like using the technology engagement.

So I started to do a lot of research to figure out what is actual engagement, when it comes to technology tools where it can be beneficial to cognition and learning. And I read hundreds of research papers around tech. And I found there's a lot that we know in the research world that we're not sharing with the practitioner world. And there are definitely ways to be able to define engagement, enhancement, and extension of learning through technology based on good learning and the science of learning. And a lot of the tech use in schools had just not been that way.

So that's where the Triple E Framework really came from was bringing the science of good learning into use with technology and not just going on, kind of, that artificial gut feeling that it's fun or students are behaving and using technology. And not depending on the tech company to tell us what to do. But instead using our good pedagogy that we know is out there. There's been a lot of school districts that have been using the Triple E Framework now. I'm a little bit overwhelmed with the number of school districts.

But not only school districts. What I'm seeing is also teacher preparation institutions are now using the framework as, kind of, a core foundational skill and rubric for their new teachers, in order to be able to bridge the science of learning with what's happening with technology, which is just so important to see. So that's exciting for me to see. And I hope that you find it useful in your journey as well, as you start to look at the good science of learning and what we should be doing with technology and the Triple E Framework being a big piece of that.