This is an awesome discussion. We have the opposite issue in our school district. They actually cut out technology department. We now have to share a technology support person between two schools, and they are not readily available when needed.
We also are in a STEM school where there is a push to use technology, but the school doesn't seem to be familiar with how to use it. I now volunteer two days a week to maintain "scootpad" for three classrooms. I know this is a big step down from iPads. Our school isn't going to buy each kid an iPad. But, I became interested in promoting scootpad because it is lined with the core, and I have two sons with mild dysgraphia issues who detest writing out homework and it was a fight every evening. These children now have an option to do common core lined practice online, or their written work. My kids grades all went up with scootpad. But. And here is what's sad... The teachers believe and are probably correct in their assessment of what program is popular changes yearly. They have so little time to teach and implement everything that the kids need to learn, so they don't want to dedicate their time to learning a new program that lets the kids use technology to complete their work. And that's why I started volunteering. Because I was using the program over the summer break, and didn't mind setting it up for my kids classrooms.
I don't know how much this contributes to the conversation, except that a friend of mine is writing her thesis on blooms taxidermy and the hold up of implementing technology in to the classroom with the failure not being inability to learn, or even access to the technology, but teachers who for whatever reason can't learn to use it themselves.
Well, I've stated my opinion rather bluntly elsewhere on this subject, but I'd be curious to know what anyone looking into the intersection of
extant use of technology in classrooms with Bloom's Taxonomy is finding there.
Our experience (with Pearson) suggests that assessment writing is grossly incompetent with respect to Bloom's Taxonomy, which worries me greatly in
any wide-spread, whole-sale (can't spell it correctly as it's apparently spam filtered) conversion to technology.
Of course, I'm also concerned about the same things that others have mentioned-- that this mostly seems to be the latest means of extracting cash from a taxpayer-supported school budget for the large corporations who have profit-motive behind the push to put mobile devices in EVERY student's hands.
Rumor has it that Pearson is phasing
out of print materials. Think about that one.
Do others believe that too much is being spent on the technology without really thinking about if it is needed or how it will be used?
YES. It's being used rather haphazardly-- at best-- and without a clear NEED in most cases... in fact, without much in the way of evidence-based decision-making driving things at all. There simply
isn't a lot of evidence. This would be akin (IMO) to the FDA and physicians promoting a BigPharmaCo pill for the common cold without requiring any clinical trials, and making decisions based on what is coming out of BigPharmaCo's marketing department and internally generated research reports. Nobody would think that was okay because of the profit-motive providing such an incentive to produce only highly biased (misleading) claims.
But we (meaning culturally, and certainly our schools) seem willing to swallow the lure without a second thought on technology in classrooms = "better" education.
Does it? The answer is that nobody really knows.
) 