Education

On one estimate, U.S. schools have spent more than $25 billion on computers and related expenses over the last five years. This spending, whose pace continues to accelerate, has occurred despite a paucity of research establishing any substantial beneficial effects from using technology in the classroom. Most studies about computers and education have had serious flaws. The results of the better studies have been largely neutral or negative.

Educational technologists suggest that while technology has tremendous potential for beneficial use, major problems with organization and implementation are preventing effective use:

• Poor technology planning – School districts have generally spent very little time determining how technology fits into their overall educational plan. Schools typically develop plans for buying technology, but not for using it. They also rarely plan for the full costs of training, equipment maintenance and associated infrastructure. A heavy-handed push from technology companies to get their wares into the classroom, which they see as an unexploited reservoir of future customers, exacerbates this poor planning.
• Poor resource management skills – In the past, schools rarely adopted expensive equipment that depreciated as quickly as computers. While economic models do exist for textbook depreciation, so far, schools have not widely adopted similar models for school technology spending.
• No pedagogy for using ICTs in teaching – There is little developed pedagogical understanding of how best to use ICTs in the classroom, either generally or within specific disciplines. Neither education departments nor school districts tend to educate teachers about this subject. If good methods do exist, they are poorly communicated across the teaching profession.
• Poor teacher preparation – Teacher preparation and instruction on technology is significantly lacking. Educational technologists suggest that at least 30 percent of a school's technology budget be spent on teacher training, but the national average is closer to 8 percent. Training is also frequently from vendors on specific applications or hardware, rather than the sort of pedagogical training that is really needed, as discussed above.
• Poor off-the-shelf education software - Most commercially available educational software is not particularly interesting or innovative. While it can be useful for reinforcing classroom activities, its potential value is modest at best. Most educational software is "closed-ended": it provides a certain set of experiences, but does not necessarily offer entry points for teachers to shape the children's experience themselves. Even when software is open-ended, often it lacks an interface that teachers can readily use to customize it.

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