From the hand-held devices that allow us to read our favorite books, check the latest stock quotes or send electronic mail across the globe, to the vast array of resources, discussion groups and software available on the World Wide Web, clearly technology is transforming the landscape of life in the United States at an ever faster pace. Technologies also are influencing the lives of students and teachers in U.S. schools. Personal computers, the Web and related digital innovations are helping to unleash creativity and broaden the curricula in many classrooms.

Computers in schools today are far more numerous and more powerful than they were less than a decade ago. According to a survey published in Education Week in September 1999, U.S. schools lowered the ratio of students to computers from about 19-to-1 in 1992 to less than six-to-one in 1999. Nearly 90 percent of U.S. schools and 51 percent of classrooms are now hooked up to the Internet, according to Education Week. A more recent poll, by the National Center for Education Statistics, suggests that the figures are even higher -- that 95 percent of public school buildings and 63 percent of instructional rooms are connected to the Internet.

One reason for this electronic outpouring is the affordability of equipment. Computer prices have dropped dramatically -- by about one-half every three years, according to one estimate. In addition, many funding opportunities have emerged to support greater use of educational technologies. While U.S. public schools are funded primarily by tax money (and private schools by tuition payments), numerous businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies offer grants to support the use of innovative technologies in schools.

As computers have become more available, they also have become more powerful, with computational power and speed quadrupling every three years.

With all this equipment and capability in students' hands, experts emphasize that the key to unleashing technology's power in schools is a commitment to new views of teaching and learning. Technology, they say, can help shift the student's role from passively absorbing material to constructing new knowledge as part of a larger community of learners that includes experts in the disciplines, adult "telementors" and even peers across the globe. "The new technologies have helped create a culture for learning in which the learner enjoys enhanced connectivity and connections with others," says Don Tapscott, president of the Paradigm Learning Corporation. "The ultimate interactive learning environment is the Internet itself. Increasingly, this technology includes the vast repository of human knowledge, access to people, and a growing galaxy of services ranging from sandbox environments for preschoolers to virtual laboratories for medical students studying neural psychiatry."

One example of the manner in which technology can support education is the popular JASON Project. Now in its 11th year, JASON is the brainchild of Dr. Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the RMS Titanic. This year, about 400,000 students from the United States, Australia, Bermuda, Great Britain and Mexico took part. JASON enables students to join researchers as they investigate phenomena in real time. By "doing science," rather than just reading about it, students are more likely to gain a deep understanding of the concepts and skills involved, the project's proponents believe. Since the project began, involving expeditions in the rainforests of Peru and on the Galapagos Islands, among other sites, teachers use the project's curriculum materials to plan a range of in-class activities for students to prepare for the expedition and to follow up. High-tech tools -- such as message boards, electronic workshops and simulations -- make it possible for students to "be there" during each expedition and to facilitate interactivity between students and scientists all year long. A highlight of the expedition is a live satellite broadcast, during which researchers describe their experiments and discoveries and field questions from students.

JASON is just one example of how students are engaged hands-on in scientific activity using technology. In Orange County, California, educators are transforming the typical gym class through the extensive integration of new tools. Students in one class use video technology to record and then study their tennis swings and golf strokes. In another class, students use electronic monitors to track their heart rates during exercise and then use computers to portray the data in graphic form.

The resources available on the Web and on CD-ROMs burst with material to fit any topic in the curriculum. With the click of a mouse, students can tour art galleries, view primary source documents for a history project, or download highly specialized information they never could have found five to ten years ago.

In the field of mathematics, the World Wide Web is making rich databases available to students, who are increasingly being asked to use data to solve problems. Content on the Web site of the National Geophysical Data Center for example, can be manipulated by students in order to make predictions about temperatures or tides. Another Web site gives students the chance to simulate playing the stock market -- without risking real cash.

In another exciting development, students, increasingly, are filling the role of producers, and not just consumers, of useful content, particularly on the Web. Florence McGinn, a high school English teacher in Flemington, New Jersey, firmly believes that creating and publishing their work "intensifies the learning process" for her students. In McGinn's honors class for 11th and 12th graders, students videotape presentations and then make them available on the Web to students who were absent.

Such progress notwithstanding, those wishing to tap into the potential of new technologies to transform teaching and learning have obstacles to overcome as well. How successful educators and others are at addressing some of the issues discussed below will go a long way toward predicting how influential today's technologies will be in taking education in new directions.

For example, the dizzying growth of Web-based resources has led to more complex issues: How do you choose which content to use as a resource in the curriculum? How do you guide students toward sites that offer promising resources and away from deleterious content? Some experts compare trying to mine the Web for content to "drinking from a fire hose." Fortunately, a number of top educators are making available carefully screened lists of URLs so students can surf for information within a domain of tried-and-tested sites. To help students determine useful Web sites on their own, one teacher encourages her students to ask themselves the "4 Ws": Who wrote this site? What are they saying on this site? When was the site created? Where is the site from?

The second major challenge is to continue to expand the availability of new technologies while addressing disparities in access. Experts have coined the phrase "digital divide" to describe the digital haves and have-nots. One study estimated that in schools with the poorest students (in terms of family economic status), the ratio of students to computers was 16-to-1 -- far higher than the national average. In homes, the disparities are even greater. Households with income greater than $75,000 were more than nine times likely to have a home computer and 20 times more likely to have Internet access than low-income households, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

One initiative aimed at closing the gap is the three-year-old E-rate program. Administered by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, E-rate provides discounts -- ranging from 20 to 90 percent -- to schools and libraries for technology and telecommunications services. In 1999, 82 percent of the nation's public schools and more than 50 percent of public libraries received discounted services under the program. The U.S. Congress approved $2.25 billion in funding for the 12-month period ending in June 2000. "In part because of the E-rate, we are now well on our way to closing the digital divide in our schools," U.S. Secretary of Education Secretary Richard W. Riley said earlier this year.

With all the emphasis on the students, educators, too, need support -- hands-on training, as well as relief from some of the headaches that impede instruction.

The conventional wisdom -- the general presumption -- is that teachers are reluctant to try out new technologies. Larry Cuban, professor of education at Stanford University in California, disagrees. He has conducted research on how teachers use technology and has found that teachers use computers frequently -- but far more often at home that at school. They are sometimes reluctant to conduct lessons using computers, because when technical problems, commonly called "glitches," occur (servers don't operate, Web pages freeze, passwords don't work), they can distract the students and disrupt the classroom. "You can't expect a teacher to have a contingency lesson B when lesson A, which relies on the computer, doesn't work," Cuban says. "That's why teachers continue to use the textbook, the overhead projector, the chalk. They're reliable. They're flexible."

Training of teachers in educational technologies basically began with fundamentals two decades ago. Since that time, modest gains have been made. The majority of teachers who participated in the recent Education Week survey reported receiving training in basic technology skills and in integrating technology into the curriculum. Among teachers who received this kind of training, 54 percent said they felt "somewhat better prepared" and another 37 percent reported being "much better prepared" than they did the previous year.

Compared to a decade or two ago, school districts and state education departments are putting a much stronger emphasis on providing training and assistance to teachers in how to incorporate technologies into their curriculum. And virtually all of the leading Web-based programs incorporate a strong teacher-training element.

When will we know how much influence these new technologies are having in shaping new ways of teaching and learning? Perhaps the most telling sign will be when they are so ubiquitous and integrated that they become almost transparent; when students and teachers use these tools on a routine basis to enhance their work. After all, everything from blackboards to yellow school buses were considered "technologies" in their infancy, but they gradually became part of the fabric of education. Students themselves are likely to instigate change. As Don Tapscott puts it, "They are different from any generation before them. They are the first to grow up surrounded by digital media. Computers are everywhere -- in the home, school, factory and office -- as are digital technologies -- cameras, video games and CD-ROMs. Today's students are so bathed in bits that they think technology is part of the natural landscape."

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John O'Neil is contributing editor of Educational Leadership magazine, based in Alexandria, Virginia.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.