Part One The Promise: An Educator's History of the Internet
1986 1993 1994 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Summary
In February, the White House announced the Technology Literacy Challenge to bring educational technology to all students. In June, to support the initiative, the Department of educaton released the nation’s first national educational technology plan, Getting America’s Students Ready for the 21st Century: Meeting the Technology Literacy Challenge (ED3).
The Apple Computer corporation has long been involved with education and schools. From 1985 to 1996 they conducted a long term research project to investigate technology in the classroom called Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT.) Beginning with the questions "What happens when computers become a significant resource in classrooms?" and "How does a critical mass of technology affect the way teachers teach and learners learn?," the ACOT studies provided much needed insight into classroom technology practices.
From ACOT's Teaching, Learning & Technology:A Report on 10 Years of ACOT Research (Apple) (Requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader be installed on your system.)
"Early on, we found that with powerful, multipurpose tools and a learning environment that balances the appropriate use of direct instruction with a collaborative, inquiry-driven, knowledge-construction approach, students can achieve far beyond today's expectations. We also discovered that teachers are the key to creating such learning environments. And we found that they need broad administrative support to create these environments and sustain them." (Page 14)
"Bringing technology into the classroom levels the playing field between teachers and students--creating an unfamiliar challenge for teachers. This effect is compounded when the students know more about the technology than their teachers--or simply learn to use it faster." (Page 15)
"We observed that teachers' approach to the use of classroom technology evolves through a few orderly stages: entry, adoption, adaptation, appropriation, and invention." (Page 16)
ACOT studies determined that teachers adapted more quickly to technology when their development :
In The Status of Technology in the Education System: A Literature Review, Elizabeth Wellburn notes:
"...most of the more current literature is overwhelmingly positive about the potential of a variety of technologies to be powerful components in accomplishing current educational visions. Such visions include helping students 'develop a broad, deep, and creative understanding of community, culture, economics and international politics, past and present, and acquire the social skills to work across differences and distances' (Riel, 1993) by providing 'an array of tools for acquiring information and for thinking and expression [allowing] more children more ways to enter the learning enterprise successfully. These same experiences provide the skills that will enable students to live productive lives in the global, digital, information-based future they all face.' (Dwyer, 1994)."
"These visionary perspectives on the purpose of the education system are similar to those that guide most of the literature reviewed in this paper. Many of the studies describe goals of individualization, cooperation and collaboration, enhanced information evaluation, problem solving skills, and lifelong learning. These studies talk about students who become 'better citizens, better consumers, better communicators, better thinkers - better people,' (Johnson, 1996). Writers such as Riel (1993), Means (1993), and Means and Olson (1994) relate these ideas to the educational reform that is taking place (particularly in the U.S.) and describe a conviction that the technologies are now being applied to an appropriate model for education."