Archimedes was a great fan of the lever, a piece of technology that was presumably state-of-the-art when he lived. While not every person exhibits Archimedes’ enthusiasm for technology, before and since Archimedes and throughout all regions of the world people have used technology to make their lives richer and more comfortable. Indeed, the ability to make and use such tools as the fulcrum and the lever is one of the ways we distinguish human beings from other animal species.
Technology is not only a product of a given culture; it also shapes the culture that created it. The automobile is not merely an American artifact; it influences where we live, where we work, and how we entertain ourselves. It stands as a statement to others about who we are. The automobile has affected courtship patterns and relationships between races and social classes. Getting a driver’s license and acquiring a car have become rites of passage in American society. While we make our tools, to a remarkable degree our tools also make us.
Technology has always been an important part of schooling in America, but until recently the technology employed was rather simple and changed slowly. No one reading this article can remember when there were no textbooks, but the kind of textbooks we have today are largely products of the 20th century. Nor did teachers always have their primary tools—the blackboard and chalk. Slate blackboards did not appear in urban schools until the 1830s.
When I was a young boy, one of the rituals at the start of the school year was a trip to the local department store to purchase school supplies: a "Big Chief" tablet, pencils, rubber erasers, pens with removable points (they became dull quickly), and a bottle of ink. Sometimes a pencil box would be added so that I could keep track of my personal supplies. Parents and students today go through similar shopping rituals each year. The technology has changed somewhat (ballpoint pens have replaced ink and straight pens, pencil boxes have given way to backpacks), but it is essentially the same.
There have been many attempts to change the technology of schooling. They have each appeared with great fanfare and expressions of optimism by advocates. In the 1920s, radio was expected to have a major impact on schools; in the 1930s, it was to be film; in the 1950s, television; and in the 1960s, teaching machines. The one piece of new technology from those bygone years that truly found a place was the overhead projector. Introduced in the 1940s by the military, it gradually found its way into the schools. The overhead projector is easy to use and relatively inexpensive, it permits the teacher to prepare notes in advance of class and to project them onto the screen for all to see, and it can be used without darkening the room or turning one’s back to the students. In many ways it is the perfect technology for supporting the kind of instruction that takes place in most classrooms today.
More advanced technology has hit the schools at about the same time as have ideas for school restructuring and findings from the cognitive sciences. According to Karen Sheingold, "The successful transformation of student learning and accomplishment in the next decade requires effectively bringing together three agendas—an emerging consensus about learning and teaching, well-integrated uses of technology, and restructuring. Each agenda alone presents possibilities for educational redesign of a very powerful sort. Yet none has realized or is likely to realize its potential in the absence of the other two."1 I agree.
Skeptics will argue that we are merely going through another cycle of reform. School reforms come almost every decade; the schools absorb as many of the new ideas as they want and reject the rest. The result is that schools change very little where it truly counts—in the classroom. But the synergy of school restructuring, new forms of learning and teaching, and new technology will make the difference this time.
The forces driving the Information Age seem irresistible. It is impossible both to participate fully in the culture and yet resist its defining features. Thus, if the schools are an "immovable object" (and I don’t believe they are), they are beginning to meet the "irresistible force"—Information Age technology.
The analogy I carry in my head is that of a volcano erupting in Hawaii, spewing forth ash and lava. We have all seen pictures of such eruptions and what follows. The lava slowly oozes its way down the mountain toward the sea. No device or structure raised by human beings can block it. It either consumes all obstacles in fire or rolls over them. Finally, the lava reaches the sea—nature’s immovable object. Throughout the process there is a lot of noise, smoke, and steam that can distract one’s attention from the fundamental process that is taking place: the transformation of the landscape. In the most dramatic cases, entirely new islands appear. A volcanic eruption changes the environment in unpredictable ways; it is also irresistible.
Information Age technology is like that volcano. It is changing the landscape of American culture in ways we either take for granted or scarcely notice. There are holdouts. Many of us see no need for placing telephones in our cars or buying mobile telephones. Some believe that television is a corrupting influence and refuse to have a set in their homes. I know such people; I am largely sympathetic to their views. But most people who think television can be corrosive buy one anyway and try to control its use.
I cannot predict how schools will accommodate themselves to the force of computers and other electronic technologies. Some schools will move more quickly than others; some teachers will not change at all. The process may be slow enough that many teachers will be able to retire before they are forced to change. Some will quit teaching, and it is likely that some will remain anachronisms in a greatly altered school environment—antiques of a sort, surrounded by modernity but refusing even to use the telephones in their classrooms.
But schools will change! I don’t know whether teachers will use the new technologies in the ways constructivists anticipate; other refonners have urged teachers to adopt similar progressive ideas in the past with mostly negative results. Perhaps technology will support constructivist approaches and make learner-centered instruction a practice as well as a theory this time. I don’t know whether schools will have site-based management or some other kind of organizational structure. Other theories of learning and school organization will certainly appear. The exact shape of future schools is unclear, but of this I am certain: schools will be unable to resist the new technology. The new technology will be used in schools because it appeals to students and may enhance learning and because the schools can offer no reasonable defense for rejecting it.
The use of the new technologies will have a profound effect on schools. The very relationship between students and teachers will be challenged because the technologies enable learners to gain control of their own learning. In the past, schools have been places where people in authority decided what would be taught (and possibly learned), at what age, and in what sequence. They also decided what would not be taught—what would not be approved knowledge. The new technologies provide students access to information that was once under the control of teachers.
Years ago, as a high school teacher, I received a note from a colleague who was teaching a course in American history for the first time. He had given students reading assignments from one set of books while he turned to other books as sources for his lectures. The note said, "The game is up. The students know where I am getting my information." That is happening everywhere today, and the game is truly up. No teacher can compete with the power and the capability of the new technology as a presenter of information. If teachers and schools try to sustain that role, they will be whipped. On the other hand, no teachers will be replaced by a machine unless they attempt to do only what the machine can do better.
It may be that the technology will be used most extensively first by privately financed schools, such as Sylvan Learning Systems, Kaplan Educational Centers, or the schools of the Edison Project. Privately financed schools that successfully demonstrate the value of technology may provide the incentive to persuade public institutions of the instructional value of technology. Perhaps public schools that employ the new technologies successfully in restructured environments will begin as magnet schools or even charter schools; if they succeed, then the use of technology may spread to the remainder of the schools in a district. Possibly the technological challenge to public education will come from home schooling, when parents discover that through technology they not only retain the current advantages of home schooling but also gain access to the academic resources of the public schools and of the world.
The genie is out of the bottle. It is no longer necessary to learn about the American War of Independence by sitting in Mrs. Smith’s classroom and hearing her version of it. There are more powerful and efficient ways to learn about the Revolutionary War, and they are all potentially under the control of the learner. Either schools will come to terms with this fact, or schools will be ignored.
It has never been easy for schools to change, and it is not going to be easy now. The current reform effort has been compared to changing a tire on a car that is continuing to speed down the highway. The job is actually much harder than that, because it is not repair but transformation that is required. It is more akin to changing a car into an airplane while continuing to drive the car. We are asking schools to become something different, without a clear picture of what the new institution should look like, even as we continue to satisfy the public that the old purposes of schooling are being served as well as or better than in the past.
No one knows for certain what kind of technology exists in schools, how it is used, how much it is used, whether what exists is actually available to teachers, and whether what exists is broken, worn-out, or still in unopened boxes.2 It is hard enough to maintain an up-to-date inventory within a given school district without trying to do the same for the nation. Various individuals and organizations have conducted surveys on technology use, and these provide some clues as to the situation generally.
Computers. We know that the number of computers in schools has grown enormously since 1983. At that time it was estimated that there were fewer than 50,000 computers in the nation’s schools; by 1994 the estimate was revised to 5.5 million. In 1981 only about 18% of schools had one or more computers for instructional use; by 1994 this figure had risen to 98%. There is hardly a school in America today without at least one computer.
These figures tell us very little about student access to computers, however. In 1985 the median
number of computers in K-6 elementary schools that used computers was three; that number rose
to about 18 in 1989. In high schools for the same 2 years the numbers were 16 and 39
respectively. By 1994 the ratio of students to computers across all grades was 14 to 1. Thus, while
there has been rapid growth in the number of computers in each school, the opportunity for a
typical student to have access to a computer is still limited. For example, as late as 1989 a student
might have had access to a computer for one hour per week—about 4 percent of instructional time.
A second issue concerns the location of computers and how they are used. The most common
pattern in schools is to cluster 20 or so machines in a single laboratory and then to schedule classes
for time in the lab once a week. A decade ago computers were used mainly to teach programming,
to teach about computers (computer literacy), and to run drill-and-practice exercises. More
recently, computers have been used for enrichment, as work tools, and—less frequently—for
purposes of computer literacy. However, computers in elementary schools continue to be used
heavily to teach basic skills, and this pattern is growing in high schools. Federal funds for at-risk
children have been a major source of school funding for computers, so it is hardly surprising that
schools rely on them primarily for teaching basic skills and for remedial instruction. The use of
computers to support instruction in the academic areas or to allow students independent
exploration is sharply limited. Indeed, many American students have more access to a computer at
home than at school.
Most computers are purchased as stand-alone machines. It is possible to connect computers, either through a local area network (LAN) or through a wide area network (WAN). The advantage of networks is that people can work together and share information. Computer networks are common in business and higher education; the use of networks in schools, though it is growing, is still small. Moreover, school LANs are used mainly to support integrated learning systems (ILSs) within a school. Thus far, relatively little has been done to foster communication among classrooms. Schools with modems have access to commercial network services, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Apple Link, or America Online. And a rapidly increasing number of schools are beginning to use the Internet, a service originally created by the U.S. Department of Defense to connect researchers at labs and universities and that now connects many kinds of groups worldwide. The Clinton Administration wishes to build a national electronic infrastructure that would increase opportunities for schools to be connected to outside resources.
Video. Video use in schools seems to be growing and taking different forms. Instructional
television, in which a program is broadcast to schools at scheduled times during the day from a
state-operated or distsict-run studio, continues to exist, but it is not as significant as in the past.
Many of these broadcasts were developed nationally through a consortium led by the Agency for
Instructional Technology. The programs were designed to fit the school curriculum as determined
by the state departments of education that were the most prominent consortium members.
As a result of federal financing through the Star Schools program, many schools are able to use
courses delivered nationwide by satellite and originating from a single source at a predetermined
time. These programs typically feature courses that are difticult for small schools to offer on their
own, e.g., courses in German or Japanese or advanced courses in mathematics and the sciences.
Rural schools in particular have taken advantage of these offerings; about one-third of all rural
schools have the capability of receiving satellite broadcasts.
Commercial sources also provide programming to schools. In 1994 Whittle Communications, Inc., reportedly offered its programs to more than 12,000 schools and reached 8 million students. The principal program offering was a 10-minute news show called "Channel One." The program and all the equipment provided to the schools were paid for by the two minutes of commercial advertising that accompanied each show. CNN offers a rival news program called "CNN Newsroom." This 15-minute news show is broadcast early in the morning over the regular CNN cable channel. Schools are permitted to tape the program and use it as they please.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is developing new programming for schools, and the Learning Channel and the Discovery Channel both provide programs that offer useful information for schools.
As a result of this proliferation of educational programming, the VCR has become a nearly ubiquitous piece of school technology. Virtually every school in the United States has at least one, and many teachers routinely collect tapes to use with their classes. Because it is more flexible and user friendly, the videotape has taken the place of film for instruction.
CD-ROM and videodiscs offer other ways for schools to employ video. The use of these media, while still limited, is growing rapidly. According to Quality Education Data, Inc., 26 percent of all school districts had videodisc technology in 1994, as compared to 18 percent in 1992-93.
Results. It would be wonderful if we could point to specific data that would demonstrate conclusively that the use of one technology or approach produced better results than the use of some other technology or approach. Alas, the problem is not so simple.
First, the existence of a particular technology does not prescribe the way in which it will be used. Yet how a technology is actually used is critically important. One English teacher might use computers mainly for drill on grammar and spelling, while another English teacher might allow students to use the computers for word processing.
Much of the evaluation research on media use is based on a specific intervention and focuses on short-term results. It seeks to determine, for example, whether the students receiving computer-assisted instruction (CAI) perform better on short-answer examinations than do those in a control group. In studies of this kind, the experimental group nearly always wins, but seldom does the investigator study the two groups a year or two later to find out if the gain has survived. Studies of short-term results, though interesting, are of marginal value to policy makers.3
What we need are studies of an altogether different order. When students and teachers are immersed in technology over time, will we detect changes in how students learn and how teachers teach? While it may be important to see some gain on a particular test, those who are trying to reform schools have larger goals in mind. Before we spend billions of dollars to equip every student with a computer at home and one at school and before we spend millions to equip teachers and to provide them with the necessary training, we need to know whether such a colossal investment of public funds makes sense. We cannot be certain, but the study reported below should encourage us.
In 1986 Apple Computer, Inc., launched a project called Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT).4 The project began with seven classrooms representing what was intended to be a cross section of K-12 schools. Each participating student and teacher received two computers: one for home and one for school. The goal of the project was to see how the routine use of computers would affect how students learn and how teachers teach.
One issue the project hoped to confront was the possibility of any negative effects from prolonged exposure to computers. Some critics have worried that students who use computers extensively will become "brain dead" or less social from looking at the computer screen all day. At the end of two years, the investigators learned that some of their worst fears had been groundless.
Standardized test scores showed that students were performing as well as they might have been expected to do without the computers; some were doing better. The studies showed that ACOT students wrote better and were able to complete units of study more rapidly than their peers in non-ACOT classrooms. In one case, students finished the year’s study of mathematics by the beginning of April. In short, academic productivity did not suffer and in some cases even improved.
What I find most interesting, however, is that classroom observers noticed changes in the behavior of teachers and students. Students were taking more responsibility for their own learning, and teachers were working more as mentors and less as presenters of information.
By the end of the fourth year, ACOT classrooms had changed; teachers were teaching differently, though they did not all teach alike. Each teacher seemed to have adjusted his or her own style to the computer-rich environment, but all the teachers were aware of the changes that had occurred in their own professional outlooks.
The students had also changed, especially the ACOT students at West High School, a school serving urban, blue-collar families in Columbus, Ohio. Twenty-one freshmen were selected at random from the student body to participate in a study of ACOT. They stayed with the program until their graduation four years later. All 21 graduated, whereas the student body as a whole had a 30 percent dropout rate. Nineteen of the ACOT students (90 percent) went on to college, while only 15 percent of non-ACOT students sought higher education. Seven of the ACOT students were offered full college scholarships, and several businesses offered to hire those who did not intend to go on to college. ACOT students had half the absentee rate, and they had accumulated more than their share of academic honors. But perhaps the most important finding was the difference exhibited by these students in how they did their work. The ACOT students routinely and without prompting employed inquiry, collaboration, and technological and problem-solving skills of the kind promoted by the school reform movement.
This is only one study, of course, and it would be unwise to place too much weight on its findings. But those who believe that technology is the key to school reform and to more powerful learning by students can take hope from this investigation.
They may also find encouragement in the results of a 1994 study commissioned by the Software Publishers Association and conducted by an independent technology consulting firm, Interactive Educational Systems Design, Inc.5 The study reviewed research on educational technology that had been conducted from 1990 through 1994. The report was based on 133 research reviews and reports on original research projects. Some of the conclusions of that study follow.
While this study was commissioned by an organization that had a stake in the results, the conclusions seem consistent with other research findings, especially with those of the ACOT study.
Thus far I have focused on the technology available to schools today. What about the future? We are only at the threshold of the Information Age. Tools we now treat as technical marvels will seem primitive in 5 years. Commodore Pets, IBM PC jrs., and the first Apple machines are throwaway items today. We can predict with certainty that technology will become faster, cheaper, more powerful, and easier to use. We can also predict that new devices that we can scarcely imagine today will be on the market before the end of this decade. Schools that expect to invest in a single computer system and then forget about technology purchases for several years will be surprised and disappointed. Schools must make decisions regarding additions and/or upgrades to their technology every year, in line with their own strategic plans.
Without going into detail regarding specific pieces of hardware, I can say with confidence that schools should expect more integration, interaction, and intelligence from future technology. In their early days in school, computers and video were regarded as separate entities, and it was assumed they would stay that way. In fact, we can expect a continuing integration of these technologies. Voice, data, and images will be brought together into one package. One current example of this process is desktop video. In a single, relatively inexpensive unit, one has telephone (voice), computer (data storage and manipulation), and video (sending and receiving moving images) capabilities. Those who use the machine can talk to people at a distance, exchange documents, work collaboratively, and even see their collaborators on screen.
Technology will also become more interactive. In the field of distance learning, rather than rely strictly on one-way video and two-way audio communication, teachers and students will see one another simultaneously, thereby making distance learning more like face-to-face classroom interaction. Computer-based instruction will also be designed to respond to learners’ interests and abilities, giving them greater control over what they need to learn and the pace at which they learn it. And computer searches, which can now be bewildering to the casual user, will become easier and more responsive to what a user needs. Greater interactivity will make instructional programs even more powerful than they are today.
Finally, technology will have greater intelligence. This intelligence will be displayed in several ways. First, the technology will have more features and greater capacity. Second, it will have the capability to learn from the user, so that it can customize its services to fit the user’s learning style and interests. Future technology will provide not only databases but knowledge bases. And the technology will be able to stay abreast of that information most valued by the user and to alert him or her to its availability.
Integration, interaction, and intelligence. These are three features we can expect of technology in the future. And they will change the way technology is employed in schools.
What is this revolution? It is the transformation of schooling through the use of technology, and it is occurring in classrooms all over the country. The seeds of the revolution are being planted everywhere, though seldom dramatically. Occasionally, there is an announcement that District A has received a major grant that will lead to the installation of Brand X equipment in all its schools. But these are the exceptions.
What is occurring nearly every week is that one school board has approved the purchase of 10 or 20 computers for use in a school to improve writing skills; another board has approved the high school’s use of Channel One; still another has set aside funds so that a high school or middle school can subscribe to online, commercial information services, and so on. This revolution is not characterized by a major assault leading to the rapid sweeping away of every custom and practice of the past. This is a slow but steady revolution. Each decision by a schoolboard, each act of support by a principal, and each initiative by a teacher is changing the nature of schooling.
This revolution is not like any other school reform movement that I have observed, and I have been in the profession for more than 40 years. First, it is a grassroots movement. Actions by state and federal governments and by business and industry have helped fuel the revolution, but they did not provide the spark. Teachers and local school administrators are leading this revolution, and they are not leading it in order to save American business or to prove a new theory of learning. They are buying, installing, and using technology simply because they believe that students will be less bored and will learn more through the use of the technology than without it. In short, they are using technology to make schools better.
This revolution is eclectic and largely devoid of ideology; therefore, what schools do with the technology varies widely. Much technology is used for remediation, especially in the elementary grades; it provides drill-and-practice exercises that are boring for teachers to teach. School officials hope that computers used in this way will hold pupils’ attention longer and save wear and tear on teachers. This approach to learning may irritate the constructivists and many others, but as long as society emphasizes mastering basic skills we need not be surprised if some schools use technology to meet these goals and to help students pass required tests.
Other schools are using the technology primarily to provide students with productivity tools, such as word pocessing and spreadsheets, to inspire students to make their work more professional in quality and appearance. In other places, such technology as compressed, interactive video is used to share an instructor across one or more school sites. Technology has its foot in the door of classrooms all across America, and the schools will never be the same.
Some people will be annoyed to learn that there is a revolution under way and that they have not been informed of it or invited to participate. While they may know that millions of dollars have been invested in computers and other technology during the past decade and a half, they have assumed that most teachers have been resisting the technology. They may also believe that these investments have accomplished little because there has been no evidence of sharp improvements in scores on the SAT I or on national achievement tests.
In response to the first point, I agree that many teachers do not yet employ instructional technology and probably will not do so for some time. As in every revolutionary movement, those teachers in the vanguard are the dedicated ones with a special interest in the cause; the rest must be persuaded that the revolution is in their own interests. In the case of technology, we don’t make it easy to convince them. Few schools currently provide computers for each teacher, so the computers they do have must be shared. Teachers are provided little training in how to use the new technology, and seldom is there adequate technical support when something breaks down. In such a situation, it makes sense to some teachers to continue doing what they have always done rather than to spend time learning to use technology with all the attendant frustrations.
With regard to the second point, we have considerable evidence that the appropriate use of technology does contribute to student learning. These small-scale experimental results, however, are often overlooked when national results are reported. On a national scale, despite major investments to date, we have only begun to provide schools what they need. Except in a few cases, students have access to a computer for only a short time each week and then often for the purpose of working on preselected exercises. Imagine the outcry if students had access to a textbook only one day a week or if they had to share a pencil with 15 other students. Imagine a business, say an insurance company, that had only one computer for each 15 workers and made them take turns entering their data. When access to computers has been sufficient, the results have been positive for student learning.
We cannot blame teachers or students if technology has failed to transform all schools. There has not been enough time or enough money for the purchase of equipment, for training, or for support. Transforming schooling through technology will work; we have evidence that it does. But it will take time, and it will be expensive.
There are also people who do not want the technology revolution to succeed. Some are offended that this reform is truly a grassroots effort. While the technology revolution is certainly abetted by business and government, unlike most education reforms it has not been a top-down effort. This is not a reform hatched in universities or think tanks and handed on to schools to implement. Indeed, universities and most think tanks are largely unconnected to this reform. Obviously, specific professors and researchers are deeply involved, but institutional responses have been erratic: sometimes positive, occasionally negative, usually absent.
Other people want to improve schools, but they want to do it on the cheap. They hope that more regulation, stiffer accountability measures, and stirring speeches, alternating with scolding lectures when results do not improve, will do the job. They are wrong, and they are cheapskates.
A few, mainly in universities, are offended by the thought of linking technology to learning. For ideological reasons they wish to keep technology out of schools because it might "de-skill" teachers. Technology might place schools in the service of business and industry; it might exacerbate equity problems. These issues are fundamentally important to some college professors, but few teachers are listening. What may be most threatening to university professors is that they have spent their lives becoming experts in narrow areas, and now technology threatens to make their hard-won knowledge available to everyone. Much is made of the threat that the computer poses to K-12 teachers because the computer challenges their role as keepers and presenters of knowledge. If that threat disturbs some K-12 teachers, it is all the more frightening to many college professors.
The likelihood of success for the educational technology revolution cannot be judged in the same way as chances for the success of other educational innovations. First, the movement is driven by teachers rather than by outside experts. Second, teachers are not required to use the technology in prescribed ways; they use it as they choose or reject it if they wish. Third, their students are eager to use technology, and parents want their children to have access to technology in school. Fourth, once teachers have overcome their initial concern about feeling stupid while they learn to use a new tool, they find themselves using the technology in various instructional situations. They are pleased to have learned a new skill, and they gradually change the way they teach. Because of these factors, I cannot imagine that this reform will fail for the same reasons as previous reforms.
The progress of technology in the schools will surely proceed more slowly than its proponents would prefer. The reasons are mainly lack of time and lack of money. While Americans talk expansively about creating "break the mold" schools, by and large they want cheap reforms. They hope that by reorganizing the administration of schools (leading to "Site-based management") or by allowing parents to choose schools for their children, school reform will be successful. They are wrong. These cheap solutions will have little impact. In contrast, enormous amounts of money will have to be spent on rewiring and equipping schools, and still more money must be devoted to staff training. It is not yet clear that Americans want new kinds of schools badly enough to pay for them.
Lack of money will slow the revolution—making it seem more like evolution—but it won’t stop it. If you believe that schools are a part of the American culture, that the American culture is increasingly influenced by Information Age technology, and that teachers participate in the American culture as much as other Americans, then you cannot also believe that teachers will use the technology outside of school but fail to employ it in their classrooms. Technology will be used extensively in schools. That much is inevitable.
1. Karen Sheingold, "Restructuring for Learning with Technology: The Potential for Synergy," in Karen Sheingold and Marc Tucker (eds.), Restructuring for Learning with Technology (New York: Center for Technology in Education and National Center on Education and the Economy, 1990), p. 9.
2. Establishing precise figures regarding the availability and use of technology in schools is a reckless enterprise. Even when data are gathered carefully and systematically, the numbers are quickly out-of-date. Readers should judge my figures as "best estimates." In arriving at these estimates, I drew heavily on data compiled by Barbara Means et al., Using Technology to Support Education Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1993), and on data assembled for me by Media Management Services, Inc., which drew upon several databases available to the firm.
3. "Integrated Learning Systems: What Does the Research Say?," Computing Teacher (February 1995), pp. 7-10.
4. My description of the ACOT project was based on an article by David Dwyer, "Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow: What We’ve Learned," Educational Leadership (April 1994), pp.4-10.
5. Report on the Effectiveness of Technology in Schools, 1990-1994 (Washington, D.C.: Software Publishers Association, 1994).
* Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher from Phi Delta Kappan (February 1996).
| Anthology Index | Chapter 13 | Part Two Index |