Now that schools have technology, it's time to
let the technology transform schooling

By Howard D. Mehlinger

No longer can we ask whether computers, video, and telecommunications technology will find a place in schools. The technology is here: Some 4.4 million computers are in schools today, according to Quality Education Data Inc., a market research firm. That is a ratio of approximately one computer for every 10 children--more than anyone would have predicted a decade ago.

True, many of these computers are old, and many students have too little access to them. Yet, modern technology clearly has a strong foothold in schools. In other words, we have largely accomplished the first stage of education technology: acquisition and deployment. Now it is time to move on to the next stage: the integration of technology in a way that ultimately transforms the process of schooling itself.

Thus far, our new electronic tools are simply being grafted onto the old way of doing things. Our schools have changed very little, really, as a result of computers, video, and other information-age technology. We have virtually the same number of teachers, teaching virtually the same number of classes, containing the same number of students, using primarily the same instructional methods. With rare exceptions, the impact of technology on the process of schooling has been minimal.

But this is not likely to continue indefinitely. The day might come when "going to school" can be accomplished by staying at home; when textbooks are replaced by electronic sources and data; when graduating from high school can occur at any age, following satisfactory demonstration of basic competencies.

In ways that are difficult to predict, technology has an impact on the systems that use it. We should not leave this impact to fate or to those who have less stake in public education. Instead, people who care about public schools must think about the ways technology can be used to transform the process of schooling to improve teaching and learning. And to do that, we must attend to vision, planning, faculty development, support, and assessment.

Vision

"Where there is no vision," the Bible warns us, "the people perish." Public education, too, could perish without a vision. But do not confuse vision with prediction. Predictions are based on extrapolations of existing trends; meteorologists, for example, make predictions about the weather in the days ahead on the basis of such factors as existing wind currents and atmospheric pressures. A vision statement, in contrast, describes the future we want--not necessarily the one we might predict on the basis of what is happening now. We don't ask weathermen for visions of weather; we want their predictions. A visionary assumes that the future does not exist and must be created. Within limits, we can obtain the future we want, if we are willing to work for it.

American education lacks powerful visions of the future. Most school reformers base their visions on successful schools today or in the past. While lecturing others on what schools of the future should be, they seem to be blind to the possibilities of all that is around them.

We must begin to dream about what schools could be like if we would only take full advantage of the technology available to us today. How would teachers teach if textbooks were replaced by small multimedia devices that serve as both a computer and a communications tool? What would school libraries be like when students have access to the libraries of the world? How would teaching change when students can contact experts who know more about a topic than their teachers know? We have scarcely begun to imagine what schools could become when we exploit the new technology to its maximum advantage.

The first step in using technology for the transformation of schooling, then, is to build a vision of what we believe schools could become by taking full advantage of the new technology.

Planning

"Plans are nothing, planning is everything." That observation by Dwight D. Eisenhower is certainly true for technology planning. Achieving a vision requires careful planning, but unfortunately, many schools are not planning properly for the ways they intend to use computers and other technology. Even if they have developed a "technology plan," such plans are too often limited to the purchase, deployment, and amortization of the hardware. The typical technology plan is not connected to planning for curriculum, textbook adoption, and faculty recruitment. Instead, technology is treated as a separate component--like the purchase of school buses--rather than as a catalyst for changing the nature of schooling itself.

It is less important that there be a plan than that there be a process by which the largest number of people associated with a school decide how technology will be employed in the school. A planning committee made up of teachers, administrators, and possibly community members may lead the planning process, but a small group--however representative it may be--should not decide key issues without consultation with others.

The process of planning for technology gives members of the school community the opportunity to develop a vision of what they want their school to become, to assess the resources available to bring their vision to reality, to decide on goals and objectives--short-range and long-range--that are consistent with the vision, to plan the steps that are necessary to achieve their goals and objectives, and to evaluate the results of their efforts. Everyone should understand that the likely result will not be a rigid plan that will guide them for years to come. A good plan is never finished: It is always being adjusted to take advantage of new conditions--new technology, new resources, new interests and capacities among teachers, and so on.

Many school systems have approached planning in a systematic way. The Forest Hills Public Schools in Grand Rapids, Mich., for example, formed an Advisory Committee on Technology, made up of 50 educators, parents, and business leaders. After considerable deliberation, the group recommended seven principles that would guide their decisions about the use of technology:

1. Develop student skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and analysis and management of information.

2. Enable students to become comfortable with technology and understand that the technologies are merely tools to help them perform their work.

3. Focus students' attention on using technologies as tools to extend knowledge and to individualize learning.

4. Develop an active participatory learning process.

5. Integrate all of the preceding principles into all grades and all disciplines.

6. Provide a climate receptive to change.

7. Assist teachers in changing their roles from presenters of information to learning facilitators or coaches.

As a result of the plan, Forest Hills floated a bond issue that provided the funds needed to buy equipment and create a technology infrastructure for its various buildings. Equally important, school officials began to fit together programs in the elementary, middle, and high schools so as to exploit the technology in each subject area. For example, keyboarding, word processing, and desktop publishing are now first introduced in the upper elementary grades. By the time students reach high school, they are expected to use these tools in preparing composition and research papers.

Similarly, students first learn to access databases in middle school. By the time they are in high school, they are expected to use databases as part of their routine class work. Ninth-grade science classes use online weather data, for example, and social studies classes employ domestic and foreign news databases. Comparable streams of training are used to teach the students how to use spreadsheets, graphics, communications, programming, and problem-solving tools. All are introduced for the first time in elementary or middle schools and then carried forward and amplified in the secondary grades.

Forest Hills began with a vision of what the school community wanted students to be able to do upon graduation, and technology has been successfully integrated across the curriculum from the elementary grades through senior high school to realize that vision.

Faculty development

A major obstacle to the integration of technology across grade levels and the curriculum is the lack of a sufficient number of teachers who are comfortable using technology. So long as technology is treated as a special curriculum topic or a job for specially prepared teachers, the impact of technology on schools will be sharply limited. In the past, schools and colleges of education have not prepared teachers who were able to use computers and other technology. The job has fallen mainly on schools to train their own teachers through professional development programs. Such programs are notoriously underfunded, however, and this solution has not been adequate.

Consider how business prepares its workforce to use technology. Fortune magazine reported that in 1994, U.S. businesses spent over $2 billion training their employees in the use of technology; in contrast, said Fortune, 90 percent of U.S. teachers said they were 100 percent self-taught. Some teachers might be willing to train themselves, but that is not the case for the majority of teachers. Resources must be found to provide the training they need.

Nor will brief workshops be sufficient to meet the need. The preparation of teachers to use technology must be ongoing and designed to fit the needs of particular teachers. The National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, a former interagency advisory council to the federal government, prepared an analysis of teacher skill requirements and the amount of time required to reach each stage. (See chart below.)

SKILL STAGE	DESCRIPTION	PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT NEEDED
ENTRY	Teacher struggles to cope with technology and new learning environment, or has no experience at all.	None
ADOPTION	Teacher moves from initial struggle to successful training and use of technology at a basic level. (e.g., can use drill-and-practice software).	30 hours
ADAPTATION	Teacher moves from basic use to discovery of potential in a variety of applications. Teacher has good operational knowledge of hardware and can perform basic troubleshooting.	45+ hours training, 3 months experience, Just-in-time support
APPROPRIATION	Teacher has mastery over the technology and can use it to accomplish a variety of instructional and classroom management goals. Teacher has strong knowledge of hardware, local-area networks, and wide-area networks.	60+ hours training, 2 years experience, Just-in-time support
INVENTION	Teacher actively develops entirely new learning skills that utilize technology as a flexible tool.	80+ hours training, 4-5 years experience, Just-in-time support
Sources: McKinsey & Company Inc.; U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment; Teaching Matters; 21st Century Teachers

Moreover, studies of experimental schools supported by Apple Computer Corp. show that even when teachers have easy access to computers and plenty of training, it takes at least three years before they feel sufficiently comfortable with computers to begin thinking instinctively about how to take advantage of computers in their lessons.

The problem of professional development will no doubt become less urgent once the current generation of children, who have grown up with computers, become teachers. For the next decade or so, however, we must be prepared to invest heavily in professional development if computers are to be used successfully in schools.

Support

Imagine for a moment a teacher who is a computer novice but who, at the urging of the principal, department chair, or colleagues, has devoted an entire weekend to developing a lesson that uses the computer. On Monday, the teacher is prepared to run the program for the class but cannot make it operate properly. There is no one to help; finally, in frustration, the teacher abandons the effort and moves on to other tasks. It is unlikely this teacher will devote another weekend to a lesson that might fail because of the technology.

Schools need technical experts who can fix machines when they are broken and who can provide technical expertise to teachers. Schools also need lead teachers, who may or may not be technically expert but who can demonstrate how technology can be used successfully for instruction in various subjects and across grade levels.

Modern technology presents a major challenge to the way we organize staff in our public schools. More money needs to be allocated to staff members to play these supporting roles if the technology is to be fully utilized.

Assessment

Finally, schools must be prepared to conduct thorough evaluations of the impact that technology is having on learning. The primary purpose of adding technology to schools is to enhance learning. There is ample evidence that technology can make learning more student-centered, encourage cooperative learning, and stimulate increased teacher/student interaction--key elements of a sound learning environment. If student learning does not improve, however, the schools' patrons have reason to doubt their technology investment.

Schools would be wise to look for other indicators of success than mere improvement of standardized test scores, however. Useful benchmarks include such factors as attendance patterns, dropout rates, student and parent attitudes toward school, and the satisfaction of employers with the quality of high school graduates. Using computers in a history class might not increase student scores on the history exam, but it may enhance student ability to obtain information, weigh evidence, solve problems, work collaboratively, and publish a report on their findings. It is not likely that such gains will be noted, however, if the school district has not identified and benchmarked areas to be measured before technology is introduced into the schools.

There is no doubt that electronic technology will have a profound impact on schools. The only question is what kind of impact it will have and at what pace. In order to take productive advantage of technology, schools must create a powerful vision of schools they want, plan how they will obtain those schools, prepare their teachers to use the technology well, provide adequate instructional support, and evaluate the results carefully, not only to provide evidence for the community but also to provide feedback that can lead to further improvement.

-- Howard D. Mehlinger is director of Indiana University's Center for Excellence in Education, a research and development center that focuses on applications of technology for instruction, and the author of many books and articles, including School Reform in the Information Age, Bloomington, Indiana: Center for Excellence in Education, 1995.