The Technology Revolution

I’m sure that most of us are aware of the revolution that has been going on in schools around the world. The technology revolution is in full force as we make the transition from print-based learning to interactive whiteboards and Web-based references and curriculum. It’s happening faster in some countries than others (the UK, for example, is ahead of the US in this regard), but it’s happening everywhere. We have a long way to go in order to close the digital divide in many places for a variety of socioeconomic reasons, but eventually it will be closed.

We are in the early stages of the revolution, but still we are asking ourselves, “Can technology really help students learn?” Because of the significant amount of resources we are investing in hardware and software, certainly we must believe that technology will help, and there is growing evidence that test scores and retention can improve if technology is used appropriately in the learning process. When school administrators are asked the question, they firmly believe that technology helps teachers and students succeed.

I think so too, and here’s one reason.

Every October I participate in Mayor Daley’s “Principal for a Day” program, where hundreds of Chicago business people spend a day playing principal at an inner-city school. This year, I was in a 7th grade science class helping a group of kids of varying abilities find a way to test their own hypotheses. I was working with a girl whose hypothesis was that gender made a difference in the type of fingerprints.

I am quite hopeful that technology will better enable us to teach critical thinking, advance knowledge, and entertain simultaneously.And I had a sudden sinking feeling: How is this going to turn out? Like snowflakes, all fingerprints are unique, so how can she show any kind of grouping based on gender? But we dove in together — and logged in to my favorite reference source of choice, Britannica, of course — and we quickly found a graphic that...