Much has been written, and many promises made, about the myriad ways in which technology will transform education. Visions of students exploring new worlds, of teachers marshaling rich archives of digital content, of decision making driven by vast arrays of data have justified the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars on technology for our schools.

Yet with each year comes another study reporting that, in most K-12 classrooms, technology has not been integrated into educational practice in meaningful ways. We have some compelling examples of technology's affordances as showcased in magazines and at conference sessions, but to date we have failed to realize the future of rich, personalized learning environments as promised.

To understand why this is so, we must recognize that embedded in this transformative vision are not one but two challenges:

• Making technology widely available in schools and ensuring that the conditions for its effective use exist, especially technical support and professional development for teachers; and
• Leveraging these technological resources effectively in classrooms so they achieve the ultimate goal of improving teaching and learning.

Making technology widely available and usable

Access to technology in classrooms is critically important: As long as classrooms are equipped with only one or two computers, technology will remain peripheral to educational practice. For technology to be incorporated routinely into educational practice, it must be relatively pervasive, with student-to-computer ratios approaching 1 to 1, but technology also must be affordable for it to proliferate in classrooms.

Moreover, hardware and software must be reliable, well supported technically, and easy to use, or else the frustrations of using technology will preclude its widespread adoption by teachers. Finally, teachers must be well trained so that they feel comfortable with technology and, more important, understand how to use it effectively in their classrooms.

What follows are some preconditions for meeting this first challenge:

• Reduce the cost of acquiring and maintaining technology. Making computers relatively pervasive in classrooms means employing technologies that are reasonably inexpensive to acquire and maintain. The use of thin clients, inexpensive laptops, and handheld devices, for example, can lower student-to-computer ratios substantially, creating an educational environment where technology is widely available and thus can be incorporated routinely into educational practice.
• Eliminate technical obstacles. Unreliable hardware, hard-to-use software, and especially the lack of competent technical support frustrate classroom teachers and inhibit technology integration.
• Provide professional development. The private sector understands that you cannot simply drop technology into businesses. Rather, you must train and support workers to secure returns on technology investments. Teachers, too, need professional development so they feel comfortable with technology and understand how to use it properly.
• Provide technological tools and content linked to state standards. Teachers must ensure that what they teach and what their students do conforms to state standards, so they must understand how technological tools and digital content are aligned with the standards to which they must teach.
• Provide compelling reasons to use technology. Many teachers use computers for eMail or for writing reports, but not in their classrooms. Their reluctance to incorporate technology into educational practice owes in part to their comfort level teaching in certain ways, but equally problematic is that teachers see few compelling reasons to use technology, such as software that clearly adds educational value to their work or evidence that technology improves learning.
• Involve all stakeholders in decision making. Technology has become a strategic resource in K-12 education, and thus decisions about its deployment cannot be left to technologists alone. Policy makers, school board members, administrators, teachers, parents, and students all must be involved in the debate about how technology should be used in their schools, for only then will it be possible to establish a national consensus about the proper roles for technology in K-12 education.
• National organizations, corporations, and the federal government must lead. A wide range of national organizations and corporations concerned with the state of education in the United States have a significant role to play in educating their constituencies and shaping the debate about the role of technology in K-12 education. The federal government, by virtue of its control over substantial funding for education and its ability to shape national policy, must assume a leading role in this critically important debate.