A certain school district in the Seattle area was featured on King 5 news this morning as being one of the most high tech schools in the country this morning.  One of the IST staff sent me the link for the video.  As I was watching it, and them bragging about the 8- 9000 dollar per classroom cost, I couldn’t believe it when this was what I saw on the screen:

 

If you look at the desk, you’ll see one of the $1000 plus classroom response systems that they were so proudly showing off.  But in the nitty gritty reality of the classroom, with all that technology available, what was the teacher actually using to get a meaningful response from the kids?  Thumbs up, thumbs down.  Rather than take the 3 – 5 minutes of class time necessary to set up the question on the computer, the teacher (who I would classify as very smart without even knowing him/her) used the most effective method. 

 Alan November made the distinction many years ago between Automating and Informating.  Automating simply bolts technology onto what we already do… we use technology to get the same results we already get without technology.  Seems like there is some automating in the picture above.

 

Pretty fascinating to this eye!!