In a report entitled "Toward a New Golden Age in American Education," Secretary of Education Rod Paige pointed out, "Education is the only business still debating the usefulness of technology. Schools remain unchanged for the most part, despite numerous reforms and increased investments in computers and networks."
Yet with 85% of the people between the ages of 12-25 going online everyday, 76% performing the majority of their research for projects and papers online, and 51% beginning to surf the web by the age of 13, keeping technology and the internet out of the classroom is really becoming a moot point.
Integrating technology in the classroom allows students to engage in education in a way that they are accustomed. Their lives at home are filled with computers, Playstations and i-pods, therefore technology is second nature to teens.
Teachers who are opposed to integrating technology into the classroom typically complain of having to learn new programs or the unreliability of the technology itself. "There's always this awful thing when you have planned that lesson on the IWB (an interactive computer white board being used in many schools in England) and something goes wrong because there is something wrong with the system. You either have to be extremely organized and plan two lessons - one on paper and one on the white board - or you have to depend on all your resourcefulness as a teacher to pull something out of your hat," Elizabeth Baker, a teacher from a school in west London, told the BBC.
With 90% of companies reporting to use the internet for primary communication and project creation, excluding technology from the classroom threatens to put students at an educational disadvantage.
In 1996, The Education Rate program was established to obtain "state of the art services and technologies at discounted rates for schools and libraries." 99% of all public schools have internet access with one computer for approximately every five students. Unfortunately the bill has allotted no funding for teacher education, meaning the integration of technology in the classroom has become the sole responsibility of the individual educator. According to Anastasia Goodstein, author of the book Totally Wired "They [computers] are more likely being used outside of class in computer labs for typing documents, for PowerPoint presentations, or in the library for research."
Some trailblazing teachers have taken it upon themselves to start incorporating technology into their learning. In her book, Goodstein discusses a middle school teacher named Jason Wheeler who has used things like a PowerPoint game he created based on the 1980s movie The Goonies to engage his students.
According to The Washington Post, a teacher in New Jersey named Will Richardson, set up a blog for his students to discuss the book The Secret Life of Bees. He invited author Sue Monk Kidd to join the chat, which she did, giving students the opportunity to ask the author questions about the book and allowing the author to give the students more insight into the novel than Richardson would have ever been able to do in a solitary lesson plan. A separate blog was set up to allow parents to discuss the book in parallel with their students.
In Oregon, the Meriweather Lewis Elementary School updates its webpage with notes from the PTA, as well as using blogs and RSS to view up-to-date information about classes and lesson plans.
In the Bering Strait School District, located in Northwestern Alaska, schools have introduced a MediaWiki-driven curriculum content system. DART, the district's Open Source student information system, links teachers and students directly to wiki content, as well as many RSS fed district resources, podcasts and vodcasts. Students have contributed about 4800 wikis to the district's page, for academic credit during school hours. DART tells them what their entries' key weaknesses are, as well as providing links to resources that help them create well informed and well researched wiki entries.
Programs like Techtorial teach you ways to teach your students about evaluating websites so that they can be pretty equipped to research papers and projects ( http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/techtorial/techtorial002.shtml). One high school English teacher allowed students to bring in their i-pods for a poetry lesson. The teacher asked each student to chose an appropriate song, which he/she played for the class and then discussed the poetic value of the lyrics.
Bringing technology into the classroom can be an easy way to engage students already accustomed to multimedia presentation of information. It also helps prepare them for a future that will likely be filled with computers and technology.
