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In the past, student documents were stored in folders at the central office, then copied and sent to various schools when requested, explains Ramzi Adas, the district's manager for imaging services.

Instead of having a person scan and index documents, we have a middle product that can read and interpret those documents, automatically indexing them into the system,

Portland's Digital Doc Gains

He pointed out to me how similar teachers experiencing failures with students is to physicians erring in diagnoses or treatments (or both) of their patients.

In the other book, surgeon Atul Gawande described how he almost lost an Emergency Room patient who had crashed her car when he fumbled a tracheotomy only for patient to be saved by another surgeon who successfully got the breathing tube inserted. Gawande also has a chapter on doctors’ errors. His point, documented by a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (1991) and subsequent reports  is that nearly all physicians err. If nearly all doctors make mistakes, do they talk about them? Privately  with people they trust, yes. In public, that is, with other doctors in academic hospitals, the answer is also yes. There is an institutional mechanism where hospital doctors meet weekly called Morbidity and Mortality Conferences (M & M for short) where, in Gawande’s words, doctors “gather behind closed doors to review the mistakes, untoward events, and deaths that occurred on their watch, determine responsibility, and figure out what to do differently (p. 58).” He describes an M & M (pp.58-64) at his hospital and concludes: “The M & M sees avoiding error as largely a matter of will–staying sufficiently informed and alert to anticipate the myriad ways that things can go wrong and then trying to head off each potential problem before it happens” (p. 62). Protected by law, physicians air their mistakes without fear of malpractice suits.

Nothing like that for teachers in U.S. schools. Sure, privately, teachers tell one another how they goofed with a student, misfired on a lesson, realized that they had provided the wrong information, or fumbled the teaching of a concept in a class. Of course,  there are scattered, well-crafted professional learning communities in elementary and secondary schools where teachers feel it is OK to admit they make mistakes and not fear retaliation. They can admit error and learn to do better the next time. In the vast majority of schools, however, no analogous M & M exists (at least as far as I know).

If you believe that technology is a distraction and not a way to enhance educational practices, you're probably not using it correctly.

When we were kids, did we leave school every day thinking that we had to go home and do research. Homework was something that got in the way of our play. We wanted to go outside and play games or stay inside and play video games. As we grew older we wanted to connect with our friends by playing sports or talking on the phone. Suddenly, we became adults and expect all students to want to go home and do research.

Our job as educators is to build a bridge between what they use it for and what we want them to use it for.