st, schools should identify their most pressing needs or problems and ask how technology could make a difference.
“The most effective uses of technology are going to be very constrained uses” limited to a particular grade or subject area, Pogrow asserts, but married to sophisticated forms of human interaction. “Everybody wants to put a computer in every classroom; everybody wants to use computers across the board,” he argues. “The minute you say that, you're not going to be effective.”
Ultimately, argues Allan Collins, principal scientist at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., it is society's use of computers as tools that will sustain their penetration of schools. “Schools are in the business of teaching students how to read and write and calculate and think,” he writes in the September 1991 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. “As the computer becomes an essential tool for doing these things in society at large, its use by students is inevitable.”
To speed up that use, advocates are calling for much stronger national leadership in the area of technology in schools. “National leadership is absolutely essential, because it sends a signal,” says Roberts of the OTA. In addition, observers argue, the federal government should invest more money in research-and-development efforts; provide seed money for innovative ideas; and bring together state and local educators at the regional level to share information, pool resources, and think about next steps.
The Council of Chief State School Officers and other groups have also argued that the federal government could help establish a national infrastructure that would enable educational information to move freely and swiftly throughout the nation—via a combination of fiber optics, satellite, telephone lines, cable, and other transmission signals.
For now, notes Mecklenburger, “the real truth is that the power of technology in this society is mostly outside of school buildings, because, for the most part, educators haven't wanted it inside. It's far more developed in living rooms and kids' rooms and libraries and museums.”
Whether that capacity will be harnessed to change the schools themselves—as some have predicted—or whether the schools will become increasingly superfluous in an information-rich society remains to be seen.
“The conventional school curriculum—the stuff that schools pride themselves on teaching or striving to teach—is going to be available in electronic form,” warns Mecklenburger. “And the only issue is where people get it.”
This Teacher Magazine special report looks at a range of educational players who are trying to harness technology to transform teaching and learning, even as the debate rages on around them. Some are blazing new trails, without anyone to offer guidance. Others are struggling in isolation with problems that confront schoolpeople everywhere. Many express a desire for greater communication with like-minded colleagues, pride in their accomplishments, and chagrin over the inevitable mistakes that they have made along the way.
Although no single teacher is profiled heret, their voices echo throughout this report, as they struggle—sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly—to understand and use technology.
It all begins and ends with Tana Holloway. She represents the students at whom everyone's efforts are aimed, and whose experiences speak volumes about the place of technology in schools. Although Tana attends a computer-magnet program at Denver's George Washington High School, most of her classes look little different than their predecessors of 50 years ago.
As technology coordinator for the Belridge School in McKittrick, Calif., Matt Revenaugh helped plot a course that would lead his school into the new age. But unexpected barriers have led to a painful detour.
Teachers are the key to the successful use of technology—along with programming that the sophisticated equipment makes available to them. But few teachers receive the training they need, and much of the software available consists of little more than an electronic workbook.
When Dolores Escobar became dean 