"Gizmo High"...Too High?

I found this article in the Washington Post. It's about a public high school in Northern Virginia where the school system buys so much technology that the teachers complain. First, this is a prime argument for more nationally equal school funding. While the teachers at T.C. Williams complain about too many gizmos, the teachers in nearby DC public schools are lucky if the buildings aren't crumbling and the metal detectors that they do have are working. Second, this seems like less of a problem of too much tech than of badly chosen tech. Technology, like money, isn't something you can throw at a problem in order to solve it. It has to be carefully applied in the right ways, in the right amounts, to the right places.

The school in the article hurried to issue students laptops, and is now "constantly trying to play catch up with the technology." It seems to me that one of the big problems in educational technology is that in many cases, the software simply has not caught up with the hardware, so schools end up buying expensive equipment whose functionality is artificially limited. Even when good software is available, schools often don't know about it. Smart teachers are secure in the fact that any attempt to replace human interaction with technology would be worthless, so their jobs are safe from this new tech. They will respond more positively to technology when they see how it can help their students. And right now, they're just not seeing it.