There is an implicit fear when it comes to education technology that the goal is for computers to replace the teacher, the human. With this fear comes the argument that there is something special--something that can never be replicated by a machine--within the teacher-student interaction. And I think this argument is right. A monitor and a keyboard will never be able to have the impact that your second grade teacher had on your life. But why not use technology then, to maximize those moments that allowed that teacher to have the impact that she/he did. She wasn’t your favorite teacher because she graded your additions facts or because of her lecture on borrowing with double-digit subtraction. It was because of things that were more intangible, more human. Why not let technology---technology like Khan’s videos--humanize the classroom, freeing teachers to spend time on those meaningful intangibles.
When I first learned about the digital divide the focus was on access---ensuring that low-income schools had the same access to computers and the internet as higher income schools. This access gap was real and the focus was justified. In 1998 the ratio of students to instructional computers connected to the internet was 17.2 in schools with greater than 50% minority students enrolled and 10.1 in low minority student schools—a very significant gap. But over the last 12 years, as the price of computing has fallen beyond anyone’s expectations and with federal programs like ERate, the in-school access divide has all but disappeared. A study by Gray and Lewis (2009) showed that high schools with student populations of more than 20 percent at or beneath the poverty level have just below the amount of access to online district resources (90 percent compared to 94 percent) of higher SES schools as well as access to course management and delivery software (58 percent compared to 59 per...
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