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 of the school of education at San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley, she confronted both her resistance to technology and the need to prepare prospective teachers for the classrooms of tomorrow.
As a classroom teacher, Tom Snyder found most educational software to be little more than electronic workbooks, so he formed his own company to produce award-winning, best-selling software programs designed to strengthen the interaction between teachers and students.
Those at the local level often feel isolated and uncertain about technology and how to use it. They find little help or guidance from the national or state level.
Joe Kirkman represent dramatic exceptions.
Kirkman is a state policymaker in Kentucky who is overseeing one of the nation's most ambitious planning efforts to coordinate the use of technology in all of the state's schools.
For Tana Holloway and her fellow students in America's schools, technology's potential remains tantalizingly out of reach. “It has the potential to be something enormous,” says consultant Mecklenburger, “but it also has the potential to dry up and blow away.”
Vol. 03, Issue 04, Pages 17-18