By Dennis Pierce, eSchool News
Whether technology can lead to better achievement is a question stakeholders have asked now for decades. More than a decade into the 21st century—and seven years since the launch of Facebook sparked the biggest communications revolution since the invention of the telephone—we’re still having this debate. Outside of school, students are plugging in and taking charge of their own learning, as the results from Project Tomorrow’s annual Speak Up survey have shown. But when students arrive at school for their formal education, many have to power down and revert to a style of learning that arose when the goal of public education was to prepare them for industrial-era jobs. Statistics from the U.S. Commerce Department rank education dead last in technology use among 55 sectors of the economy, suggesting that the transformation the rest of society has experienced as a result of technology has left schools largely untouched. That anyone would be OK with the notion that schools haven’t changed much since the days when factory jobs were prevalent speaks volumes about how our society values education and its children.
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/09/21/on-ed-tech-were-asking-the-wrong-question/
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