Steve Jobs was wary of technology in the classroom when he was asked about the topic in 1993, and now schools decked out with the latest tech teaching tools are so far seeing stagnant test scores. Are our measurements of educational growth lacking and passé or is the problem with our schools (and ourselves) something that can’t be remedied by bytes and bots? An excerpt from a piece on the topic by Matt Richtel in the New York Times:

“CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s As You Like It — but not in any traditional way.

In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.

The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.”

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A computer in a British school in 1969: