This article (written by a teacher and submitted by a new, faithful reader) does a great job of outlining the topic of deciding how to approach the incorporation of new technology into schools and school board members would benefit from the perspective described as they develop their prioritization strategies.

We all see and perhaps own the wonderful individual technologies (those little time wasters we carry on our hips and in our bags), but until those technologies actually show a benefit to learning, I agree it would be better to focus on infrastructure that supports distribution of and collaboration around learning.

Do we really need our students worried about the perfectly formatted MS Office paper or are we focused on the content, developed through research, thought, and collaboration?

Obviously, the later, so let’s make the technology support the goals and let the Droids serve their rightful business purposes.  They are not quite learning tools, today.