Classroom of the future?

The New York Times has an online article (a version has also appeared in print) about whether the use of technology in the classroom does in fact improve the education for the students.

The article discusses Kyrene School District where digital classrooms are the norm. Here the aim is to transform the classrooms with the teachers facilitating the students' learning. However standardized tests of student performance in reading and maths have stagnated here while they have risen in other areas. They suggest that there is little convincing data to show that spending the money on technology is improving basic learning.

Teachers need some research which clearly shows the effect of technology on teaching and learning.

A question plaguing many education researchers is how to draw broader inferences from such case studies, which can have serious limitations.

Educators would like to see major trials years in length that clearly demonstrate technology’s effect. But such trials are extraordinarily difficult to conduct when classes and schools can be so different, and technology is changing so quickly.

And often the smaller studies produce conflicting results. Some classroom studies show that math scores rise among students using instructional software, while others show that scores actually fall. The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.

I would be interested in what other teachers think of the article and their ideas of the use of technology in schools.