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Last year, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that requires all high school students to take some online classes to graduate, and that the students and their teachers be given laptops or tablets. The idea was to establish Idaho’s schools as a high-tech vanguard. To help pay for these programs, the state may have to shift tens of millions of dollars away from salaries for teachers and administrators. And the plan envisions a fundamental change in the role of teachers, making them less a lecturer at the front of the room and more of a guide helping students through lessons delivered on computers.

“Teachers don’t object to the use of technology,” said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which has studied the views of the nation’s teachers using grants from organizations like the Gates and Ford Foundations. “They object to being given a resource with strings attached, and without the needed support to use it effectively to improve student learning.”

Social bookmarking. When you save a Web site as a favorite or bookmark, it's added to a list that stays within that browser. Use another computer, and you don't have access to that bookmark. When you use a social-bookmarking service, you save your bookmarks on that server, making them available to you wherever you access the Web, and allowing you to share them with others. Ask your students to create accounts on a social-bookmarking service and to bookmark Web sites, news articles, and other resources relevant to the course you're teaching. Create a unique "tag" for your course and have your students use it, so that their bookmarks can be easily found. Ask students to apply multiple tags to the resources they bookmark, as a way to help them locate their bookmarks quickly and to prepare them for the kind of keyword searching they'll need to do when using library databases. If you're teaching a face-to-face or hybrid class, be sure to spend some class time having students share their latest finds, so they can see the connections between this work outside class and classroom discussions. Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.

the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.

online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country—not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.

Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.

an advantage of the Internet is that students can stop the lecture and rewind when they do not understand something.

Kristin Joos built interactivity into her Principles of Sociology course to keep students engaged. There are small-group online discussions, and students join a virtual classroom once a week using a conferencing software called WiZiQ.

In a conventional class, “I’m someone who sits toward the front and shares my thoughts with the teacher,” she said. In the 10 or so online courses she has taken in her four years, “it’s all the same,” she said. “No comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late.”