The District  has made major efforts to integrate advanced technologies into  classrooms for years. The goal: have cool things in the schools.

This generation is increasingly visual. That’s why it makes perfect sense for the District to drop five grand per board to provide Smart Boards in almost every classroom. These tools have been implemented in revolutionary ways: showing movies, presenting PowerPoints, and allowing, with the push of a button, multi-colored pens to show the difference between function A and function B. Televisions, projectors and dry-erase markers are things of the past, if not for their sub-inflated price, then for their lack of visual interactivity.

But, as the wheel of technological development never stops spinning, the District couldn’t settle with boards that you could throw a rubber ball at to reveal the reward for correctly answering a question.  They are now purchasing iPads for the bargain price of $499 apiece so students have digital textbooks they can zoom in on. Imagine being able to see charts of the number of votes cast for Regan in the 1980 general election in a larger size than was intended. The possibilities are endless. What does it matter that iPads can hardly run the sheer number of programs that are available to students on laptops (which the District already has)? They present Angry Birds on a larger scale than the screen of an iPod Touch.

We should give the District a round of applause for putting their left foot forward. In the grand scheme of things, the overall effectiveness of these investments is irrelevant. The old saying, “It’s the thought that counts,” doesn’t only apply to the hand-knitted sweater that gramdma gave you. The effects of these technologies haven’t really been proven to be advantageous yet, so now is the perfect time to slide under the radar and beef up the specs on paper without having to follow through. The cost efficiency there alone is enough to jump on this opportunity.

And the additions keep coming. Students are being issued e-mail addresses. While they may already have e-mail accounts for their Facebook and Twitter accounts, if the District didn’t spend that money on the time and resources that an in-house e-mail system that colleges like Dartmouth have stopped using, that money would just sit there. What else would they spend it on? More laptops? More advanced programs? More iPads?

It’s not so much that what the District is doing is necessarily wrong; it’s the way they are going about it. iPads aren’t bad, but there seems to be no clear-cut plan for using them effectively. It’s not that teachers don’t know how to use Smart Boards–they have been trained–it’s that teachers are having a tough time using them effectively with the discipline they are teaching, and that is where training is lacking.

And teachers need to take the initiative to learn these things themselves because they know their teaching style better than the District does. If teachers want to teach well, they have to use technology effectively.Technology can open doors in ways that conventional methods of teaching can’t, but they have to be used effectively. There needs to be purpose in using it. If this is unclear, we made a Keynote presentation about this on an iPad that should clear things up a bit.