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We love these teachers and but the message can often be interpreted that these tools are easy and you too can be a master teacher and technology ninja by joining twitter and starting a blog. It ain't that easy, but that sometimes gets lost in the excitement a reimagined classroom. 

Technology is great. I love my iPhone. It can do all sorts of things, but making me a better dancer isn’t one of them. Every day parents ask their kids, “What did you learn today?” It’s never “How did you learn it?” or “On what device did you learn it?” but always, “What?” Yet so long as the answer to that doesn’t change, neither will educational outcomes.

So here are some tips and examples I’ve gathered from my classroom and my work as a one-day-a-week tech coach at my school to help teachers better understand and negotiate the digital push in schools. Give Yourself the Time to Learn

After asking good questions and doing some reconnaissance on tools and apps that your colleagues love, choose a few. Let yourself dabble with the tools. Become comfortable with their interfaces, and give yourself time to understand their purpose and fit (or lack thereof) for your classroom habits and curriculum. At the same time, allow yourself time to say "no" to other flashy new gadgets and tools while you are exploring.

Tips for Tech-Cautious Teachers

I love my iPad as a learning device, I think the only answer right now is the laptop (at least for kids older than 3rd grade).

Kids may already have their own mobile devices, so open up BYOD.  Why buy them things they might already have?

the district shelved the idea when it became apparent that students preferred using their personal mobile devices and that the cost of buying and ­refreshing ­notebooks every three to four years would be ­prohibitive

surveyed the 155 eighth-graders ­participating in the pilot, they learned something ­interesting: Although students loved the idea of having their own computer to do their homework, 52 percent of them were using their personal computers rather than those issued by the school

IT department beefed up the wireless network in its two middle schools and the high school and standardized on a set of cloud-based applications

nstead of banning the devices that we know our students love, we should figure out how to use them to engage our students. Rather than banning them from the classroom, we should be showing students how to use them appropriately.

Teaching students how to use those tools properly and finding a balance between technology and other hands-on methods of learning is what really makes sense

Simply, it’s time to admit that the Internet has changed the way we do scholarship and will go on changing it. There is so much inertia in the academic world, so much affection for fussy old ways. People love getting all the brackets and commas and abbreviations just so. Perhaps it gives them a feeling of accomplishment. Professors torment students over the tiniest details of bibliographical information, when anyone wishing to check can simply put the author name and title in any Internet search engine. A doctoral student hands in a brilliant essay and the professor complains that the translator’s name has not been mentioned in a quotation from a recent French novel, though of course since the book is recent there is only one translation of the novel and in any event anyone checking the cited edition will find the translator’s name in the book.

I believe that meaningful work can also teach students to love challenges, to enjoy effort, to be resilient, and to value their own improvement. In other words, we can design and present learning tasks in a way that helps students develop a growth mindset, which leads to not just short-term achievement but also long-term success.

robbing kids of their ability to concentrate

The question, though, is: distraction from what? And also: What’s inherently wrong with distraction?

Formal education, as we’ve framed it, is not only about finding ways to learn more about the things we love, but also, equally, about squelching our aversion to the things we don’t — all in the ecumenical spirit of generalized knowledge.