21stcenturyed.com

…and wait…and wait…and wait…

Besides simply being an interesting alliteration, the title of this post is related to an article discussing a study to be released this Fall from a Virginia county school district.
A link to this article got passed around to several folks at my day job. It sparked a flurry of emails. Some of the comments were cautious at best. Given that this is a “teaser” article and no definitive evidence is presented – not even a good flavor for the study’s design or the method in which the laptops were implemented – I think it really is too early to tell what to think about this.

But, one of my colleagues wrote:

I’m tired of watching my kid’s teachers assign poster projects when they could be assigning student’s a collaborative project which involves students from another country with a web page as the product

I agree. Even when we have computers in the classroom, so many educators fail to see the power sitting on their desks. Not that the computer’s presence is a panacea. Rather, it permits you to reach kids where they live and opens up new tecahing methods and techniques impossible witout it. I am really looking forward to seeing this study when it comes out. I suspect that the details will expose that the pedagogy rather than the technology is what led to the gains experienced by students.

What do you predict?