Don Knezek, the CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, compares education without technology to the medical profession without technology.

“If in 1970 you had knee surgery, you got a huge scar,” he says. “Now, if you have knee surgery you have two little dots.”

Technology is helping teachers to expand beyond linear, text-based learning and to engage students who learn best in other ways. Its role in schools has evolved from a contained “computer class” into a versatile learning tool that could change how we demonstrate concepts, assign projects and assess progress.

Despite these opportunities, adoption of technology by schools is still anything but ubiquitous. Knezek says that U.S. schools are still asking if they should incorporate more technology, while other countries are asking how. But in the following eight areas, technology has shown its potential for improving education.



8 Ways Technology Is Improving Education

Diana Laufenberg shares 3 surprising things she has learned about teaching -- including a key insight about learning from mistakes.

With the direction we as a society are headed, the Internet is going to be the great divide. Like the difference between horses and cars. Those who ride, and those who fly by the seat of their pants....those who know how to use it, those who try, and those who still send letters via snail mail, and wonder why it takes so long to reply.

The internet is a plethora of knowledge, all at your screen/fingertip. I can look up the same information a college graduate spending his parent's hard earned money doing, as long as there is an internet connection. I have the same knowledge.... I'm not sure about anyone else, but that would make me feel pretty equal.



Is the internet, not formal education, the new great equalizer?

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, There’s a tsunami coming.

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.


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