Supporting Effective Technology Integration and Implementation
Scott McLeod, Jayson W. Richardson · 2013
Compared to where they were three decades ago, schools have made significant progress regarding their implementation and integration of digital technologies. That progress often has been quite slow, however. Although Apple 1 computers were donated to schools as early as 1975 (Computers in the classroom, n.d.), it was not until the mid-1980s that computers started to become something other than a novelty in teachers’ classrooms. Technology use by educators and students continued to be relatively rare through the mid-1990s until the federal Technology Literacy Challenge Fund helped schools try to make computers available to every student (Riley, 1996). Fostered by additional funding, investment in infrastructure, multiple national educational technology plans (United States Department of Education, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2010), and concurrent growth of the Internet and home computing use, digital technologies proliferated more quickly in American schools over the last decade and a half. Technological changes in school learning environments over the past 15 years have been substantial. For instance, in 1994 only 3 percent of public school classrooms, computer labs, and library media centers had Internet access (National Center for