Distinction between “teaching with technology” versus
just “learning with technology.”

What’s the difference?

Well, many of our tech initiatives center on teaching with technology. When parents look at their kids’ classrooms they see the ones that they remember, but with an interactive board instead of a whiteboard, a computer on the teacher’s desk and a couple of desktops in the back of the room. Sure they see their kids typing their papers and doing online research, but they also see them listening to lectures, carrying home textbooks and filing out worksheets. It’s the same stuff students have always done. Most people outside of schools sense that although we are spending money on technology, it’s not radically changing the way that students learn.

If that’s true, it’s because using technology to change learning takes a lot of work. To focus in on learning with technology it means asking teachers to rethink their classrooms and the way they do their work. It means requiring personnel to participate in professional development and telling them they need to learn new skills every year. It means inviting into our classrooms lessons that will fail and having lots of conversations with parents that won’t understand what we are doing. It means explaining to board members that learning is different now. It means replacing the old standbys in the budget -- copy machines, calculators, paper textbooks and dozens of others – with new line items that give every student a computer and access to the Internet. Most of all, it means admitting that none of us has all the answers and that we need to figure it out together as we go.

In short, learning with technology is really hard.