ading equipment; the lack of adequate software that dovetails with teachers' curricular needs; the absence of assessments that reflect the complex thinking skills encouraged in technology-rich environments; and the dearth of teacher training.
The OTA study reported that only one-third of K-12 teachers have had even 10 hours of computer training, and much of this has focused on learning about computers, rather than learning how to teach with them. A recent survey of education majors indicated that less than one-third perceived themselves to be prepared to teach with computers. Yet half the states do not require or recommend preparation in technology for their new teacher-education graduates.
“If you go to teacher-education programs around this country,” says Linda Roberts, project director for the OTA's technology studies, “what you find is a faculty and a curriculum that has, at best, given lip service to thinking about technology as a resource.”
But according to James Mecklenburger, president of the Mecklenburger Group, a private consulting firm, the problems with the educational use of technology “are far more political than technological; far more human than electronic.”
In essence, educators have yet to rethink a vision of learning in which technology plays a vital role.
“We haven't built a powerful pedagogy around the use of the technology,” says Pogrow of Arizona. “We haven't done the hard work of designing whole new types of learning environments in a systematic way.”
Contrary to early predictions that technology would somehow replace teachers, research has found that only the most skilled and sophisticated practitioners are able to integrate technology successfully in their classrooms. Indeed, the initial introduction of technology in schools can make the work of teachers harder and more time-consuming.
But it can also be tremendously rewarding. According to Karen Sheingold, research director in the division of applied-measurement research at the Educational Testing Service, technology can change what teachers do in powerful ways. Experienced teachers whom she has studied say they are capable of presenting more complex material to their students, that they are acting more as coaches and less as information providers, and that student work can proceed more independently and in ways that are better tailored to meet individual needs.
Other studies have found a dramatic decrease in teacher-dominated activities and a shift to more engaged students in technology-rich environments.
But such changes will not happen automatically or overnight.
Indeed, Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford University, predicts that unless existing classrooms and schools are “altered substantially . . .most teachers will use computers as an aid, not unlike radio, film, and television.”
“I predict no great breakthrough in teacher use patterns at either level of schooling,” he writes in Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. “The new technology, like its predecessors, will be tailored to fit the teacher's perspective and the tight contours of school and classroom settings.” To the degree that technology is flexible, it will be bent to fit existing practice, he predicts. To the degree that it is not, it will be jettisoned.
Such predictions have led observers to plead for a closer relationship between current efforts to “restructure” the schools and the use of technology.
Indeed, Sheingold maintains that many of the ambitious national goals the country has now set for itself cannot be attained without “widespread, creative, and well-integrated uses of technologies of many kinds.”
Still others suggest scaling back from the grandiose visions of technological applications in schools that ran rampant during the early 1980s to more practical and constrained uses. “Without much evidence to support unrestrained entry of machines into classrooms, reopening policy discussions on both the how and the why seem to be in order,” Cuban argues.
Rather than buying machines and then deciding how to use them, experts sugge