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The formal expression of this is 'technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK),'" Bull says. "TPACK says that you have to know three things to use technology well. You first have to know the content. It's going to be hard to teach calculus if you don't know calculus yourself. You also need to know the pedagogy associated with that content-- the instructional strategies that will be effective. Finally, you need to know the innovation or technology that you're going to then use."

Ultimately the importance of technology or its absence pales in comparison to the importance of a teacher's attitude, effort, and success. More opinionated academics and nonacademics alike need to view teachers in action and see whether they connect with their students and get the job done. Some of these wonderful and successful teachers will have beautifully planned and integrated technological endeavors, and some will have a whiteboard, chalkboard, or a circle of desks in the center of the room.

Vigdor and Ladd are to be applauded for emphasizing that it is not the technology, but the social conditions of their use that are the most compelling concerns in play here.

What are we doing as educators to meaningfully engage our students, to give them the autonomy, purpose, and opportunity for mastery which they crave and to which they respond with focus, energy, enthusiasm, and diligence?

Do we think that before technology, most students avoided distraction?

Yes, of course, students can and do get distracted when their computers and smartphones are open on their desk or lap, and teachers need to respond thoughtfully to this problem.    It is fine for teachers to ask students to put them away in certain times.    William Stites has a terrific post about how schools can confront and manage the technological distraction issues

Interactive whiteboards are the classroom technology that teachers say they most value, and though tablet-style eReader devices such as Apple’s iPad haven’t been around for long, they’re already considered the second most useful mobile classroom technology behind laptops,

60 percent of their time using educational resources in the classroom that are either free or paid for by the teachers themselves.

Parents and teachers must be a part of monitoring and modeling

How ever will we train all those teachers?

ake something off teachers' plates rather than put more on. We have to prioritize, and including technology is too important.

What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of using technology for learning? Are tech tools essentials, distractions or somewhere in between? How are other teachers using technology? What tech skills do today’s teachers need to use digital tools effectively?

We need to stop pretending that technology can fix problems that aren’t technological in nature. Kids are bored. They don’t know why they’re learning what they’re learning. The solution isn’t asking the question better. The solution is asking a better question.

Technology doesn’t make teaching better or worse, simpler or more complex–it changes it all entirely. The frameworks. The models. The training. The instructional design. Curriculum. Lesson design. Assessment. Learning feedback. Classroom management. School design. All of it.

not to imply that stage 1 is “bad” and that learners should always be given free-reign with powerful technology. The age of graduated release of responsibility model (show me, help me, let me), as always, holds true here as well.

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

e latest techno-fad, destined to distract administrators and upset curricula for a few years until the next one comes along. But there are two reasons why adaptive learning might prove more durable than that. The first is that the textbook companies have invested in it so heavily that there may be no going back. The second: It might, in at least some settings, really work.

“I like to think of analogies to other places where science and technology have had an impact, like transportation. We went from walking to horse-drawn carriages to Model Ts, and now we have jet planes. So far in educational technology, we’re in the Model T stage.”

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

It's as if Beatlemania junkies in 1966 had had the ability to demand "Rain" be given as much radio time as "Paperback Writer," and John Lennon thought to tell everyone what a good idea that was. The fan–celebrity relationship has been so radically transformed that even sending reams of obsessive fan mail seems impersonal.

The teens' brains move just as quickly as teenage brains have always moved, constructing real human personalities, managing them, reaching out to meet others who might feel the same way or want the same things. Only, and here's the part that starts to seem very strange—they do all this virtually. Sitting next to friends, staring at screens, waiting for the return on investment. Everyone so together that they're actually all apart.

 We used technology like people do at work – as a tool to helps us get our job done, learn and conduct research, and to connect and collaborate, to build communication skills, and to solve problems. The big insight: technology can power deeper learning.

These questions don’t center upon, nor are they dependent on, technology, though if technology is an integral part of our lives, some of the answers to these questions might lie in the use of technology.