I’m not really sure where to start to respond to this article about education and technology in Idaho.  Here are a couple notable quotes with my reactions:

Last year, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that requires all high school students to take some online classes to graduate, and that the students and their teachers be given laptops or tablets. The idea was to establish Idaho’s schools as a high-tech vanguard.

To help pay for these programs, the state may have to shift tens of millions of dollars away from salaries for teachers and administrators. And the plan envisions a fundamental change in the role of teachers, making them less a lecturer at the front of the room and more of a guide helping students through lessons delivered on computers.

Certainly encouraging less lecturing is a worthy goal but making teachers a guide to computer based lessons doesn’t sound much better. Do these lessons support collaboration and problem solving? And, if the students don’t learn, will the computer be blamed?

Teachers are resisting, saying that they prefer to employ technology as it suits their own teaching methods and styles. Some feel they are judged on how much they make use of technology, regardless of whether it improves learning. Some teachers in the Los Angeles public schools, for example, complain that the form that supervisors use to evaluate teachers has a check box on whether they use technology, suggesting that they must use it for its own sake.

Whenever I read a quote like this, I’m reminded of my first supervisor when I taught high school English. After attending a workshop about using the overhead projector to support instruction, she decreed that we use the overhead in some way every day. While I was already using the overhead to support writing instruction, I certainly did not use it every day just as I did not use any pedagogical practice or resource every day. My resources and instruction were based on the objectives and content. I’ll admit it: I even delivered a lecture now and then if it seemed appropriate.

Some of her views are echoed by other teachers, like Doug StanWiens, 44, a popular teacher of advanced history and economics at Boise High School. He is a heavy technology user, relying on an interactive whiteboard and working with his students to build a Web site that documents local architecture, a project he says will create a resource for the community.

“I firmly believe that technology is a tool for teachers to use,” he said. “It’s time for teachers to get moving on it.” But he also spoke last year on the capital steps in opposition to the state’s program, which he said he saw as a poorly thought-out, one-size-fits-all approach.

Idaho should be grateful that it has such thoughtful educators and might take a lesson from them about differentiation. The state is assuming that ALL kids would learn better on a computer just as they assume that ALL teachers lecture. Perhaps the training could focus on differentiation and providing kids with instruction that helps them learn not that makes a state look high tech.

For his part, Governor Otter said that putting technology into students’ hands was the only way to prepare them for the work force. Giving them easy access to a wealth of facts and resources online allows them to develop critical thinking skills, he said, which is what employers want the most.

This is the quote that led to my title: I just don’t see the connection between easy access to facts leads to developing critical thinking skills. Isn’t it what you DO with those facts that leads to critical thinking? There’s where quality teachers can really make the difference.