Technology in the classroom: steps toward a new vision

Abstract

The history of technology in the classroom is one of cycles of exaggerated promises, highly publicised installations with committed teachers, and masterful and inventive excuses for why the promises went unfulfilled. But in spite of this history there is a new vision of technology in schooling emerging, thanks to the World Wide Web. This vision can be seen especially in schools that have used technology as a lever to achieve school‐wide reform in teaching and learning. The present study is based on 94 case studies of successful school reforms where information and computer technologies (ICT) were also heavily used. The studies, done in the 1999–2000 school year across 23 countries, were all case studies, organised around five central hypotheses. These hypotheses tested whether ICT acted as a catalyst for school reform, how ICT diffused throughout the school, what the key elements were for successful implementation of ICT, whether ICT use resulted in further inequities in schooling, and what happened to academic standards when ICT was heavily implemented. From the innovations and ICT uses in the schools studied, a vision of how ICT can assist with a transformation of K‐12 schooling can be discerned. By expanding the time and space of schooling, opening the classroom to the outside world, forming communities of learners, parents and teachers, and by giving all schools access to an expanding world of resources, both teaching and learning can be advanced to a new level of effectiveness and social importance.

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