"The Perfect Storm for Education"

Will Richardson has an interesting post this morning entitled, "The Perfect Storm for Education." The post questions why schools are so much slower to use technological advances than other institutions. I wrote a response to Will's entry that I wanted to post here.

So Will, How do we start? Here's one possible suggestion: Ask students to identify a current event from overseas that they would like to investigate. Once they identify the event they have to obtain three different perspectives of what happened. They then have to develop a single presentation of the different perspectives in which they incorporate sound, some of it being from a personal interview of somebody involved with the event. Students will then have to explain how this presentation fulfills one or more mandated objectives. As I write this response, Will, I realize taht many schools lack the necessary technology to have students do these assignments. So, what comes first, the acquisition of the technology so that teachers can learn to use it effectively or the teacher demand for the technology?