Ask about technology, and many more schools will tell you what they have than will tell you how they use IT to support student achievement.

Two decades down the path of promises, the benefits of educational technology seem to reside in the eye of the beholder. Those who've focused on purposes see more improved practice than those who've simply been dazzled by potentials.

What is the promise of the Internet?:

• To center learning around the student instead of the classroom.
• To focus on the strengths and needs of individual learners.

• To make lifelong learning a practical reality.

Effective technology use only happens in context, where system goals align with building level practice. Far too often, the best uses of technology, although exemplary and illuminating, are limited to the classrooms of individual pioneers. We've been stuck in this phase for more than a decade. This is why I selected this theme for my presentation. Our painful lessons need not be repeated, as you embark upon the crucial mission of extending the true benefits of technology to all learners. We are also trying not to repeat these mistakes, but certain patterns take on a life of their own. Constant vigilance is necessary to navigate one's way into the future.

This is true at both a systems level and a personal level. The Internet and technology in general are passive: if you are headed in the wrong direction, you'll only arrive there that much sooner! The magic is in how it connects people, how it makes possible deeper interactions between knowers and that which they would know, and how the application of what has been learned improves real life on the world that all of us share.

I am an enthusiastic user of, and advocate for technology empowered learning. I look forward to opportunities such as this, to share a vision, as well as the stories of people whose pursuit of such vision has led to the discovery of best practices. Last February, the day before I was to deliver a keynote presentation to the technology coordinators in the state of Missouri in the US, an email came across my screen that stopped me in my tracks.

A recent and unprecedented national effort to wire America's classrooms, the e-Rate, has had a catalytic effect on moving the management of educational technology from the classroom to the district level. E-rate put in place a process which awarded several billions of dollars to make telecommunications available to all schools. It required schools receiving this money to devise district technology plans, develop appropriate use policies, design staff development offerings to ensure that the people involved knew how to turn boxes and wires into tools for learning. Each year, we celebrated the approach of having 100% of our schools connected.

However, large numbers of our population, particularly in rural, and economically poor urban neighborhoods, still weren't connected, still weren't using the technology or making preparations to take their place in a global digital economy. We call this the "Digital Divide".

The email described a conference that had invited major technology CEOs to see presentations by young adults from communities that would be considered on the wrong side of the Digital Divide. These young people had mastered the technology and had both high levels of skill, and the high salaries these skills command. Their message to the CEOs was this: "if you would make sure our schools had technology, and teachers who knew how to teach it, many of our peers could learn these skills too, and you wouldn't have to lobby Congress to change the immigration laws on the one hand, and worry about welfare on the other. We have learned to do these high tech jobs, and so can many more of us, if you'd only give us the chance!"

The report went on for a dozen or more examples, until it concluded with these words:

Ever since that day, my presentations have changed. I realized at once that unless and until we link our use to technology with the wider, deeper goal of ensuring that our education efforts are reaching all students, and are geared toward improving the performance of both students and the systems that serve them, we run the risk of "watering the petals" instead of watering the roots.

Throughout this presentation, I'll refer to their Six Essential Conditions as they amplify my points. Now it's time for the first, for only when our vision is shared and supported can we water the roots:

Perhaps the biggest missing ingredient in educational technology today is Vision. The absence of vision precludes leadership, whose absence in turn prevents the growth of sustainable, effective programs. As Paul Preuss points out, "Systems thinking is understanding the connections between people and processes in organizations. Performance of the system depends on how the parts fit, not on how good the parts are."

Our systems approach leads to our fundamental assumption that the formation of IT Teams, comprised of the people who play key roles at the building level (principal, school library/media specialist, lead teacher and technical specialist) is the best strategy for surviving the challenges of educational technology.

Technology is the Big Bang that has propelled literacy into an expanding universe. Scientists, no longer able to keep up through printed journals, now understand each others’ work online, through sophisticated visualizations and simulations made possible by supercomputing. Economists, unable to process the volume and complexity of financial transactions, employ armies of programmers to deploy powerful tools for realtime visualization of the flow of wealth. Visualization extends literacy by enabling people to perceive relationships hidden below the surface of vast amounts of data, and to synthesize meaning from these relationships.

Literacy has always been at the heart of the education enterprise. From the time of the 3Rs to now, being literate has been a consistent yet evolving foundation for citizenship in each cultural era. In the past two decades, educators have progressed through media literacy to computer literacy to information literacy as goals to prepare students to take their place in a transforming world.

Most people today rely upon video and multimedia sources to keep up with their changing world. The choices for receiving information expand daily, through video, movies, the Internet, wireless and emerging technologies. With the approach of broadband and digital convergence, transformation through digital storytelling presents the promise for change unseen since the invention of the printing press.

However, literacy has always been a two-way street: it is not sufficient just to read, one must also know how to create. The current focus on raising student achievement to benchmark levels overlooks a sobering fact: only 3% of America's students can write at an excellent level. Writing is the foundation upon which all other forms of media are built. Unless students write often, and on topics that they truly care about, this situation won't change.

The expansion of literacy into video and film-making has come at a price: the entry costs are enormous, both in terms of equipment, teams and skills required to produce quality products. Consequently, there is an opportunity gap facing developing young artists. As a result, the voice and insights of youth are missing from the media that inform and shape our culture.

Our liberty depends upon having citizens who are both prepared and motivated to address the problems of the day. Yet neither students nor their teachers are being supported in development of fundamental literacy skills in contemporary media.

I have four fundamental observations about leadership, which shape the effectiveness of your message, and determine whether people get it or not:

• In any setting, people sense the presence (or absence) of leadership, and react accordingly.

• Leadership is based on permissions. These permissions are two-way, and require relationships, both for their creation and to be maintained.

• Relationships may begin individually, but are soon organized into groups. Groups, rather than individuals, form communities. Paradoxically, the effectiveness of groups is determined by the presence of passionate, dedicated individuals who've taken ownership of the message.

• As groups become more adept at communications, their actions are more likely to result in effective collaborations that meet the needs of communities. Conversely, until groups become capable communicators, sustained collaboration is not possible.

In the case of the growth path of educational technology over the past two decades in America, it is obvious to me that the repercussions of allowing technology leadership to be optional, at all levels, is one of the most persistent obstacles we face. While the "proof of concept stage" may have required the best efforts of individual (some would say maverick or loose-cannon) educators, the isolation of their success has erected a formidable barrier to extending the lessons throughout the school. In systems where grass-roots innovation enjoyed support from the top levels, the spread of effective practice is greater. Far too often, however, this leadership was transient, since the average tenure of school district superintendents is only two to three years. By the time the roots were just about to take hold, a new leader would cultivate the garden, and we'd have to start over.

The National School Board Association's ITTE "Models of Success" identifies four core areas which determine the effectiveness of educational institutions: Supporting Student Learning, Building Communities of Learners, Providing Effective Professional Development and Creating Strong Infrastructure. Reaching any of these goals requires increasing sophistication in organizing people and what they know, as well as providing them the time and resources they need to implement carefully considered plans.

The most recent report on educational Internet Usage (QED's Internet Usage in Public Schools 2000, 5th Edition) reports that 95% of America's public schools have connected to the Internet at the start of this year, with the figure expected to rise to 99% by June. The top three uses (Evaluation of Curriculum Materials, Research and E-Mail/Communication) are encouraging, but run the risk of bypassing the most powerful applications of technology: knowledge management of the education enterprise itself.

It is this aspect of technology use that has fueled the largest economic boom in human history, as corporations reap the benefits of their investments in Intranets over the past 5 years. They've made sure that their workers and their markets have got the message: when people are empowered to work together more effectively, the increases in productivity are exponential. However, these benefits do not accrue automatically with the introduction of computers and networks. They must be carefully and consciously cultivated, as you work to build your online learning community.

Much of the ambivalence which surrounds public discussion of public education has its source in the lack of solid information about what's being accomplished as a result of billions of dollars and trillions of hours. We can't know how to improve until we have ways of measuring what's being done. I recommend that everyone read Mike Schmoker's book Results: the key to continuous school improvement (ASCD) for an insightful treatment of this vital topic. Before we can evaluate (judge to be good or bad) we must be able to assess (state clearly what did and didn't happen).

Allan Olson, founder of the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) is doing some of the most powerful, innovative work in assessment today, having worked on this challenge for more than 25 years. Achievement Level Tests, or ALTs. "provide information about student growth in learning over time, including detailed information on individual strengths and weaknesses that can help guide curriculum development. Because the tests provide high-quality quantifiable data, the group immediately began plans to develop a computerized version."

I decided to accept Mike's challenge and design all of my networked activities in a way that could be measured. We often hear goals like "preparing students for the 21st Century" or "helping students become lifelong learners", which are nearly impossible to verify through observation. Here are some alternative ways of formulating goals that do lend themselves to measurement:

Technology: I can tell which forms of technology students have learned, and can measure whether these new skills lead to improved performance in their abilities to read, write and think. My Intranet keeps track of each user's activities on the network, so I can tell how often and how long each student spent doing word-processing, researching on the Internet, creating web pages, and more.

Cooperative Learning: I can see, by reviewing the conferences (collaborative workspaces) I've created for each group who has made contributions, the quality of these contributions, and the level of feedback students exchange with each other, their teachers and any telementors who may be assisting them.

Language Arts: I can review the reading logs that I've set up as a database which students access over the web, to find out who is reading what, how they enjoy what they read, and their use of language in convincing others to try their favorites. We have an "official" approved reading list, for each grade. Many of my favorite books weren't on the list when I was an eighth grader (strangely enough many of these are now considered "modern classics"), and my students love the opportunity to lobby for their "excluded" books to be added by the "powers that be". I've explained to the students that their testimony, via the database, will be considered for nominations of additional books as the list is reviewed each year. They're pretty careful about their use of language in these reviews!

I can also gauge improvements in their use of language to construct meaning from the vast amounts of data their Internet research returns, by comparing projects students complete at the beginning of the year with those they produce at the end of the year. Our Intranet allows me to review materials students save in their "electronic portfolios" as exemplifying their best work.

When Janet Murray first showed me the AASL Information Literacy Standards, I realized that the objectives for students formed the most compelling reason I'd found for the use of education technology. If technology could help students learn to do these things, they'd really be prepared for the 21st Century and their new roles as lifelong learners!

The trick was this: how could I develop activities with measurable objectives that demonstrated mastery of these standards? The results of my first attempt, which guided my work with students this year, turned out like this:

In terms of the three information literacy goals, I found that these objectives could be measured for their technology, cooperative learning and language arts dimensions on the basis of what I observed in my computer lab, what the network user logs captured, what students posted to collaborative workspaces, and what was observable in the final product. The assessment showed what did or did not happen with respect to each of these activities. Because peer review was built in to the activities, students themselves got a sense of what constituted a great project and what represented a shoddy effort.

The goal of information literacy leads to the next level, where these skills are independently applied. Our Intranet made this level of assessment possible as well.

Finally, the level of social responsibility comes into play. Knowledge building is a group sport, not an isolated pursuit. Students need practice in honing these skills, and technology provides avenues for collaboration that are unprecedented in human history. Our Intranet provides the capabilities for these collaborations, as well as a means of observing what students have done with these opportunities.

Among the obstacles facing leaders (according to Warren Bennis, noted author and founding chairman of USC's Leadership Institute ) are:

• an information glut
• factions which make consensus increasingly difficult
• loss of community and civility
• alterations in the nature of work and the economy

Communication and collaboration are fundamental to factors that mobilize people to act, as well as strategies that successful leaders employ to bring about action. These skills have always been valued, but take on even more significance in the digital age. Just as teachers need to create curricula that meet standards, whether working for their own classrooms, or as collaborative efforts with other teachers and schools, the need for project support permeates any educational institution.

It's not that we doubt the power of technology to improve learning. It's that we know that without sustainable support, it can't happen. We doubt the likelihood that those calling for higher standards and 21st Century skills will provide what is really needed to make IT happen and keep it working. Our doubts come from what we see (or the lack thereof) at the building level. I've written a new book, the Survivor's Guide to Technology Coordination, as a guide, informed by our most inspired vision, as well as our most healthy skepticism, to help form the teams that are required to provide sustainable support for improved learning.

There are several essential roles which must be played, regardless of staffing level or school size. In an ideal setting, the Principal would be working with a team comprised of a Library Media Specialist (LMS), a Teacher Leader (TL) and a Technical Specialist (TS). In most cases, many people are wearing more than one "hat" so I've decided to describe the functions rather than the titles, so that you can determine how the people on your team will divide up the responsibilities. I do this so that:

• your partners can learn about your role and get deeper understanding to the challenges you face

• you can gain better understanding of the needs and challenges your other team members face

(District Level - Tech/Curriculum Coordinator)

We've witnessed incredible growth of the Internet and Intranet infrastructure in education. This growth has created a need for district administrators and classroom teachers to meet new competencies, set new priorities and re-evaluate past teaching practices in order to make use of the latest technologies. As technology moves into schools, someone must coordinate overall technology planning, hardware/software acquisition, implementation, budget oversight and grant writing, teacher professional development, maintenance and upgrades, and curriculum support. Anyone who's ready to take on that set of challenges deserves to wear the wizard's hat!

Coordinator is an apt description, as on the surface these areas seem to be within the respective realms of different departments and/or personnel. For instance, many still consider the Technology Coordinator as a source for technical content support ("Why isn’t the printer working?") as opposed to instructional content support. Each role is required to complete successful whole picture of effective technology use in a classroom. Understanding the Big6 Process, and how it places technology within the wider goal of enhancing problem solving skills through the effective use of information, is a valuable strategy in bridging this gap (see Chapter 7: Information - Overcoming Overload, Achieving Contemporary Literacy).

In the days of the barnstormers, the pilot was often the only passenger. Particularly brave (or foolhardy, depending on your point of view) individuals would sometimes go up for a ride, returning to earth with stories they could tell their children and grandchildren. As I write this now, at 35,000 feet, returning from vacation on another coast with my family, air travel has become routine. The pilot no longer flies the plane: computers do. The complexity of systems required to keep a modern jetliner aloft extend far beyond the capabilities of any individual. Like technology in schools, it is a team affair.

However, we still need pilots. Someone must take responsibility for understanding our destination, what it takes to get us there, and monitoring conditions in order to respond to changing conditions in a manner that will allow us all to arrive safely. Unlike this aircraft, schools have no autopilot upon which to rely - there is no substitute for the leadership that only the principal can provide at the building level.

The pilot monitors fuel, direction, progress on the flight plan, as well as modifications that may be required en-route. There are plans to address a range of potential on-board emergencies, and the pilot monitors the crew in terms of their readiness to address any which may arise.

This analogy can't go the distance, however. Pilots receive extensive training about the capabilities and requirements of the systems they manage. Principals don't enjoy similar preparation to lead technology rich environments. Their preparation reverts back to the bailing-wire and bubblegum fixes of the barnstorming era, if they are willing to go up at all.

Librarians learn the skills of scholarship and art of information retrieval in graduate programs in library science. Although it is not widely known outside their ranks, School Library Media Specialists (LMS) hold dual citizenship in the worlds of teaching and information science. In schools with effective technology programs, one often finds the LMS and the media center at the core, with effective partnerships reaching out to all classrooms.

Managing knowledge is quite different from managing learning, and requires different interactions with people, resources and activities. This is one reason why the partnerships that comprise effective IT teams can be so powerful. Understanding the role of the LMS is crucial to developing such an effective team.

Although there was no name for it at the time, I've recently realized that I spent most of my career in education as a teacher leader. I didn't do things the same way as my peers, not from the first day as a music teacher to the last as computer teacher. Rather than be guided by conformity, I pursued whatever worked best for my students. Sometimes this brought me into conflict with policies, practices and attitudes that could best be summed up as "that's the way we do things around here" with the unstated admonition "so don't rock the boat."

This didn't stop me from wanting to share the joy of learning every day, right along with my kids, regardless of their age or mine. I'd try to engage my colleagues in team projects, or turn them onto resources, and found that some were willing to pick up on these invitations, while others were relentless in their desire to go it alone.

It wasn't until I read Hank Becker and Margaret Riel's The Beliefs, Practices, and Computer Use of Teacher Leaders that I understood the demographics that we're up against, that it's not simply a matter of personalities or preferences (theirs or mine).

The Teacher Leader is like the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As remarkable as the appearance of a mountain of ice floating in the sea may be, it is the implication of the other nine-tenths, submerged, out of view, that is most awesome. It is also this unseen part that will sink reform efforts quicker than you can say Titanic. In otherwords, for every pioneering educator you see doing wonderful things in your school, in magazines, on the web, there are nine others who are in varying stages of reluctance/resistance. This is not news either, but the characteristics shared by different kinds of teachers can provide us with information to develop strategies to guide every teacher, thereby reaching every child.

This role is often confused with the Firefighter, because the Technical Specialist is usually asked to drop whatever she or he is doing to put out some technical fire. In reality, the health of the infrastructure is depends more on careful design and building, on taking the time to maintain what's there and educate users how to avoid creating unending problems. That's why we've chosen the Hard Hat as an image. Climbing in ceilings to run Cat5, slogging through basements to find entryways for cable, digging behind desks and file cabinets that haven't been moved in a generation to check if a network connection exists…these thankless tasks come with the territory of keeping it all working. Finding the balance between what technology can do and the ability of people to keep up with it presents the major challenge for this role: it is the people rather than the gear that are most problematic. No wonder so many Tech Specialists seem to prefer fixing stuff that won't work to working with people who don't seem to be able to learn. Bridging this gulf is one of the most important tasks for the IT Team.

"We must reinvent ourselves as a dynamic, flexible team. It is impossible for one of us — teachers and administrators, library media specialists, or technology teachers — to do handle every responsibility the school of the future will present. To create the technology-rich learning center of the future, we need full partnership and true integration of responsibilities. By joining forces, we can share our strengths and assume a leadership role in schools and districts feeling the pressures of technology."

Web-and-Flow is MUCH more than a set of templates. Embedded in Web-and-Flow is top quality professional development, scaffolding, and tutorials that accompany teachers on their restructuring journey right from the day they first learn about the web, on through to when they are transforming their classrooms though the creation of WebQuests. Web-and-Flow makes it possible for teachers to create a variety of quality web based activities. Each activity has it's own format and curricular purpose ranging from open exploration, developing factual knowledge, making affective connections, reflection, metacognition, prompted writing, concept building, and authentic problem

Improving education is a goal that's taking its place at the top of national, state and local agendas. An unprecedented effort, continuing for more than a decade, has generated a growing body of research, best practices, recommendations and standards, all geared toward increasing student achievement. While these strategies may be diverse and divergent, they all share one common attribute: none of them can happen until we are able to direct more time to their implementation. The Prisoners of Time report illustrates how even the best designed plans founder on the rocks of our habitual uses of this precious resource.

There is a fundamental contradiction to the idea that all children can learn, and giving every child the same amount of time and support to accomplish that learning. While the idea of "everyone gets the same" sounds reasonable on the surface, 30 years of brain research tells us that children in the same classroom (organized by birth-year as the most significant piece of data) vary up to three years in terms of their developmental readiness, strengths and deficits with various modalities of learning (sometimes called multiple intelligences). Instead of giving every child the same (amount of time, class size, technology support), give every child what she or he needs to succeed. Once we keep learning constant and make time the variable, we can indeed move closer to the goal of supporting every child succeeding to the level to which she or he is capable. Technology can play a huge role in leveraging both the time, instructional support and assessment tools we can focus on children at any part of the educational spectrum.

The time problem is pervasive in educational systems. The adoption of various means of communication has exacerbated, rather than eased this problem. Think of your day as an education leader, and how it begins. A host of messages in many forms awaits your arrival. The mail has been sorted and sifted by your administrative assistant, and yet a pile of vital correspondence is on your desk. Add to this the stack of phone messages, already prioritized for urgency. Faxes and emails confound the situation. Triage is a common response to the overwhelming flow, with only the most urgent communications designated to receive immediate attention. Control of your calendar is essential if you are to manage, rather than be managed by these communications.

Should you decide that meetings with key players are required to address either the planned for and unanticipated developments, how long does it take to nail down a date and time? How much phone tag is involved? What is the lag between identifying the need to meet with people, either face to face or by conference call, and the actual event?

Your learning community's effectiveness depends upon the ease with its members communicate and collaborate. We live in a networked world. Increasingly, traditional obstacles of time and distance recede as organizations adapt their processes to harness the power of communications technology. However, none of this matters if the people you need to reach are not getting your message about powerful, research-based strategies that effectively use technology.

This problem is nothing new. You already use a host of communications methods to manage the work, people and knowledge of your organization. You know when to send a memo, schedule a meeting, make a phone call, send a fax, mail a package. You know when to have someone paged, or when it's best to make an in-person visit. You know which conversations to document in print, and which are best left spoken on a confidential basis. The introduction of technology has simultaneously accelerated and confused the process, because of the speed, power and sheer magnitude of choices it makes available.

It's hard to understand the benefits of technology until they are seen in the context of helping you get done the most vital tasks you face. Technology will not (and should not) replace traditional modes of communication. But just as you wouldn't want to walk everywhere, neither would you want to fly. In contemporary society, anyone who does not know how, when and when not to use a particular method of communicating is increasingly communication handicapped.

Communications is the lifeblood of any organization, especially one dedicated to learning. The health of your learning community depends upon the timely and accurate exchange of thoughts, examples, and discussion.

I close with observations from another friend, Kathleen Fulton, project director of The U.S. Congress' Web-Based Education Commission:

The bipartisan, congressional Web-Based Education Commission set out to discover how the Internet is being used to enhance learning opportunities for all students, from pre-kindergarten through high school, at post-secondary colleges and universities, and in corporate training.

In the course of our work, we heard from hundreds of educators, policymakers, Internet pioneers, education researchers, and ordinary citizens who shared their powerful visions and showed us the promise of the Internet:

We heard that the Internet enables education to occur in places where it normally does not, extends resources where there are few, expands the learning day, and opens the learning place. We experienced how it connects people, communities, and resources to support learning. We witnessed how the Internet adds graphics, sound, video, and interaction to give teachers and students multiple paths for understanding.

I hope that my observations have helped raise questions that will guide you as you build powerful learning communities that make the promise a reality for everyone you serve.