Web Sites (all sites will open in a new window)

Assessment and Evaluation of Technology in Schools from the National School Boards Association Technology and Learning Conference, October 22, 1996. Explains how to evaluate the use of technology in the classroom and the process of writing an evaluation plan. Identifies the top nine toughest goals to evaluate and lists the possible indicators for measuring success for each one.

Benefits of Technology Use from Getting America's Students Ready for the 21st Century: Meeting the Technology Literacy Challenge. A Report to the Nation on Technology and Education, United States Department of Education, June 1996. This section of the report provides an annotated overview of the main benefits of technology use, interspersed with short descriptions of school's experiences with technology and brief quotes from teachers and students. Concludes with Characteristics of Successful Technology-Rich Schools.

Case Studies Documenting Technology Use in Pennsylvania from Educational Technology Impact Analysis. The primary purpose of this research study was to identify and develop a series of detailed case studies demonstrating how technology was being used to solve educational problems in Pennsylvania. The project teams visited fourteen sites during March, April, and May 1999. Each team compiled interesting stories documenting the use of technology to solve educational problems. The result is this series of case studies in multimedia and text-only versions.

CEO Forum National Technology Report: Integrating Digital Content Year-three report, 2000. The CEO Forum was founded "to help ensure that every child in the US is equipped with the essential technological, critical thinking, and communications skills necessary to compete in the 21st century." The Forum is pursuing this objective through an annual education and technology assessment (the STaR Assessment) of almost 90,000 schools aimed at measuring the nation's progress in public schools on the issues of hardware, content, connectivity and professional development. This year-three report focuses on "Integrating Digital Content." The year-one (1997) and year-two (1999) reports, both available at this same site, focused on "Hardware and Connectivity" and on "Staff Development." The year-four report (scheduled for 2001) will be on " Outcomes and Assessments."

The Costs and Effectiveness of Educational Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop Arthur Melmed (editor), 1995. Under the hyperlink "School-wide Technology Implementations and Their Benefits," this site features one-page overviews of the experiences of five different technology-rich schools with regard to implementing technology.

Critical Issues in Evaluating the Effectiveness of Technology from the U.S. Education Secretary's Conference on Evaluating the Effectiveness of Educational Technology, 1999. The article identifies seven critical issues related to evaluating the effectiveness of educational technology.

EDUTECH Online Resource for Education & Technologies
maintained by TECFA, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland. This is an on-line virtual library for educational technology including: sites of the month, an alphabetical search for 24 themes, a query search, and an opportunity to submit a theme to Edutech's database.

Fools Gold: A Critical Look at Children and Computers from the Alliance for Children. This provocative 104-page report challenges our national infatuation with high technology in early childhood and elementary school. Fool's Gold examines the real costs of computers in terms of money spent, lost educational opportunities, and health and developmental risks. In addition, it draws on research to emphasize the healthy essentials of children's intellectual, emotional, social, and physical growth.

Internet Use by Teachers : Conditions of Professional Use and Teacher-Directed Student Use A report by Henry Jay Becker, February, 1999. Part of the Teaching, Learning and Computing research project. This web site offers an extensive 1998 national-wide survey of 2,250 teachers on Internet use. It surveys topics such as teachers' access to the Internet, frequency of teacher and student Internet use and perceived value of Internet use for teachers. It concludes with a multivariate analysis. To view Becker's report, you can skip over "Order formal report here" and download the pdf files directly.

School Case Studies: High Tech Impacts On Low-Income Students A Research Project conducted by SRI International and sponsored by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, US Department of Education. During the 1992-93 and 1993-94 school years the SRI research team visited nine sites attempting to use technology in ways that support their overall education reform agenda. All nine are technology-rich schools of predominately low-income students.

Teacher Professionalism, School Work Culture and the Emergence of Constructivist-Compatible Pedagogies from Henry Jay Becker and Margaret M. Riel, University of California, Irvine, 1999. This paper examines the relationship among teachers' role orientation, the school culture they experience, and their personal teaching practices. It is based on information from a national sample of 4,000 teachers across 1,100 schools, including schools involved in major reform programs. The report describes conditions under which teachers are more likely or less likely to report engaging in teaching practices consistent with current constructivist reform ideas.

Teacher Role Orientation: Classroom Focus versus Collaborative Professional Practice is two colored bar graphs from Henry Jay Becker and Margaret M. Riel who explored how teachers who had discussions with other teachers about pedagogical and subject-matter issues differed in terms of the use of a "knowledge construction" approach to instruction from teachers who kept to themselves.

Teaching, Learning, & Computing: 1998 is a National Survey of Schools and Teachers with reports and snapshots by Henry Jay Becker and others. Funded by the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations.

Technology Counts '99: Building the Digital Curriculum from Education Week, Sept. 23, 1999. This site, the third of Education Week's annual reports on education technology, features a survey of 1,400 teachers "the most comprehensive survey to date on teachers' use of and attitudes about digital content." Some findings: "a lack of training is the most important obstacle inhibiting the use of digital content," and "training on 'integrating technology into the curriculum' was more helpful to teachers than training in 'basic technology skills.'" The key issues are addressed in articles in 3 chapters: "The Quest for Quality," "Training Matters," and "Making the Match."

Books

Technology and Education Reform: The Reality Behind the Promise by Barbara Means, 1994. The classroom reform movement and the introduction of technology into classrooms are two of the most significant trends in education today. Based on research by the National Study on Technology and Education Reform, a project by SRI International sponsored by the US Department of Education along with additional research by the author, this book provides a framework for linking the instructional uses of new technologies to the teaching and learning goals of school reform. It provides concrete illustrations, supported by research, regarding how technology can be used to help both students and teachers accomplish things they could not do otherwise.