Henrico County, Virginia, has garnered national attention for its program of giving laptops to kids once they reach sixth grade. But if the school system is not prepared to truly transform the teaching and learning process, the results may not be what we expect. In this article, at least one mother made her daughter give the laptop back because it had become a time waster for the girl and her grades had dropped.
It is easy to blame it on kids spending too much time chatting and goofing off on online Web sites, but those are only symptoms of the real problem. I can take some of the blame for all this, as the Blacksburg Electronic Village project helped our county schools become the first school system in the country to have broadband to every school and to become the first school system in the country to have broadband in every classroom. Since then I have worked on many other K12 technology projects--all with the best of intentions, but the results have been mixed at best.
Teaching kids is a complext process that requires years of experience, and you can't just drop a few computers into the middle of a centuries old way of doing things and expect magical results. I have learned that the hard way. In my experience, it is school administrators that are most often at fault. They are eager to win grants and push technology into the classroom; it looks good to parents and to elected leaders that decide school budgets.
But those same administrators are often much less enthusiastic about actually rolling up their sleeves, working side by side with teachers, and trying to figure out what changes need to be made to really leverage the promise of all this technology. And there is what I call the "five percent problem." Dump a bunch of technology into a school, and under any circumstances, you will have about five percent of teachers who are motivated to dig in and do amazing things with the stuff. Those "five percent" projects become the poster children for technology in the classroom. They are used to say, "See what great stuff all this is!"
But those five percenters are the exception, not the rule. Most teachers need a lot of help and support from the top down to get comparable results, and it usually is not there. So while computer manufacturers make money selling computers to schools, our kids are still learning the same old way. If your school district wants money for technology efforts, ask some hard questions about how administrators intend to support teachers with good tech support, appropriate learning resources, and assistance with curriculum changes.