I was showing my grad students how to use Google alerts today and used education technology as my example query.  This story was the first one that showed up in the News section. My first thought was really? Are we still thinking that any technology is going to spur an education revolution?

Here’s the money quote:

A lot has to happen in education before tablets can reach their potential. Most important, the people who run schools have to overcome their deep-seated fear of students in possession of connected devices. Yes, they can facilitate cheating and distractions, but teachers have always had to deal with cheating and distraction in classrooms and this is a terrible reason to deny students the advantages to students of everything from a library at their fingertips to instructional materials enabled by the tablet.

He is right that a lot has to happen in education but I don’t have a sense that deep-seated fear is the biggest issue. After 3 days at ISTE’s Leadership Forum, the biggest issue I hear is concern with how to really make a powerful use of these tools, way beyond textbooks or apps. I use my iPad in so many ways beyond creating and reading ebooks, his two major examples of the education revolution wrought by iPads.

Then, I reread the article and it occurred to me that a non-education writer’s definition of revolution is probably just different than mine: it doesn’t have to do with pedagogy and a shift from traditional practices, it has to do with technical ubiquity:

There are many reasons why technology has been an educational disappointment for three decades. Probably the most significant is that the computer has never become students’ constant companion but remains instead an occasional tool.

That’s all the further he goes. If you aren’t going to change the way teaching and learning take place, then other than helping lighten the backpack, computers are only needed occasionally.

Schools, particularly K-12 education, is a sector that has lagged badly in the adoption and use of computer technology. The explosion of tablets may finally be about to change that.

So, tablets may change students’ access to digital technologies…if that’s your revolution, we are well on our way if the other headlines in my Google alerts are to be believed.  School after school are adopting mobile technologies, mostly iPads.  But it is still to be seen if a real revolution takes place.