0.2 Newell, p. (march 2010). technology disconnected: teacher  (Page 6/10)

While receiving financial incentive from the E-Rate program, schools throughout the country involved their communities in wiring the classrooms through NetDay, an outreach and work program that organized community volunteers to work alongside teachers and technical coordinators to put network wiring into the schools. Net Day was the brainchild of Jon Gage, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, who called Net Day the equivalent of the “high-tech barn raising” ("To Succeed Today, You Need the Right Connections," 1996). Many states, including California, held organized events during which parents, students, and concerned community members pulled Ethernet cabling into classrooms to establish a computer networking infrastructure. In many states, Net Day became an annual or semiannual event. A few schools involved in these events had the foresight to include technology coordinators who taught instructors how to include technology in their daily teaching activities during in-service days immediately after the wiring was pulled (Barbier, 1999).

In addition to cementing the need for information technology in schools in the mind of the public, NetDay responded creatively to the costs of wiring all schools: before the E-Rate program was established, a 1996 estimate by the United States Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure indicated that it would take 4 to 5 percent of the total K-12 budget to connect every classroom by 2005 to the Internet, with a significant amount of money being spent on the actual wiring of the facilities (Leiken, 1996). With the wiring of the schools complete, a significant phase of integrating information technology into the classroom was complete – at least in the minds of many people outside of the world of education.

Even with a significant investment in technology, the task of integrating technology into education – a task never well defined operationally or in terms of what the educational outcome should be – was far from complete. It was only a few years after NetDay popularized the idea of technological literacy that questions of how the technology would be integrated into classroom practice arose. In 1999, the Department of Education published the results of a survey of over thirty-five hundred of the nation’s educators that asked about their ability to use computer technology. Only a third of public school teachers considered themselves prepared to use computers and the Internet (Cooper, 2000). Only 20 percent indicated that they were “very well prepared” in using computer technology in the classroom, although approximately four-fifths of the educators indicated that they had some training in computers and related technology. This drew immediate response from Secretary of Education Richard Riley who voiced his displeasure with the survey results (and underscored the need for computer training to be integrated better into teacher training), stating “teacher education and professional development programs are not addressing the realities found in today’s classrooms…One-shot workshops…carry little relevance to teachers’ work in the classroom”(Bolt&Crawford, 2000). While teacher training programs certainly were involved in (and perhaps partially responsible for) providing teachers who were technologically literate, they were given most of the blame for not providing teachers ready to include technology-enhanced education into their instruction. In 1999 at a symposium on technology in education, the disconnect between research and practice in education was recognized by the symposium keynote statement that “If the same disconnect existed in medicine, we’d still be dying of typhus” (Press, 1999).