If high speed communication is an engine of progress, then email is now considered a bottleneck.
We could do much more, here is an exerpt from Christopher Dawson's rant: From: education.zdnet.com
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I just happen to have an elementary school in my district with a small number of students (about, 140), solid internal network infrastructure, aging computer equipment with too few terminals per kid, and the highest per capita paper consumption of any school in my district.
- Provide every student, kindergarten through sixth grade, with a Classmate or other similar device (the new tablet Classmates and Eees coming soon would be ideal to replace the average spiral notebook, among other things).
- Provide all teachers with a full-featured multi-media laptop suitable for content creation and management.
- Implement a software stack and student and teacher machines such that teachers can control and direct learning; include polling and quizzing capabilities similar to those of interactive response systems as well as classroom management systems like Moodle.
- Implement a server infrastructure supporting the storage and sharing of all documents and, wherever possible, electronic texts and supplemental classroom materials.
- License the use of e-textbooks wherever possible and appropriate; task teachers with creating electronic repositories of useful supplemental materials regardless of the presence of an electronic text.
- Create a robust wireless infrastructure both in the school and in common gathering areas in town (the town is fairly rural and geographically quite large, meaning that broadband penetration is not yet adequate to serve all students).
- Expand the existing website to become the repository of all school information and tie into Google Apps for Education, providing all students, teachers, staff, and parents with access to the facilities within Google Apps.
- Given the lack of broadband penetration, consider pushing announcements and parent materials to each student’s laptop to be shared with parents as needed.
- Provide ongoing professional development (and, as a result, develop an appropriate “going paperless” curriculum) for teachers so that they can fully leverage the technology in class.
- Leverage additional Web 2.0 tools to facilitate collaboration and sharing within classrooms, within the school, and within the community.
- Solicit feedback on “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the effort via teacher, student, parent, and administrator contributions to a going paperless blog.
- Use standardized testing data over multiple years of this program to more objectively assess the impact educationally.
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