The recent series of reports on technology’s unfulfilled promise by the New York Times called “Grading the Digital School” is an important wake-up call for everyone who claims that the digital frontier will help transform schools as we know them. While every other sector — from manufacturing to health care to energy security to politics — has been largely disrupted by the creative tech revolution of the past decade, scholars and skeptical journalists wisely remind us that “schools are a special case.”
To break through their deeply entrenched approaches, we must address two fundamental failures. By doing so we can advance the still powerful possibility that educational technology can be a positive disruption for our nation’s learning capacity.
First, technology on its own is relatively neutral: But if teachers and other caregivers are not knowledgeable about ways to deploy key design elements to personalize, deepen and extend learning, we face the typical adaptation cycle in which practitioners place new labels on the same old ineffective practices. Second, our country is rapidly escalating gaps in income and opportunities to learn that if left unchecked, will cascade for at least a generation.
The current 2012 election debate over long-term economic policy options that are completely silent on education reform, and the dismal recent NAEP and PISA performance data which show our performance in reading, math and science either flat-lined or lagging behind other countries’ advances are cause for alarm for anyone who is serious about our nation’s future prospects as an innovation leader. Read more …..
More News @ KRISARU News