Four weeks into school, the students said they were enjoying the lessons. They had already created a list of documents, e-mail accounts, and blogs, and were piling the computers full of thoughts on a series of books they read every night at home. Emily Torres had already read a Nancy Drew book, a book called Rotten School, and another called Captain Underpants.
She listed the books in her first blog post, visible to the world at Emily605.blogspot.com. The post also includes her goals for the year: two years of growth in reading and two years of growth in writing.
Spevack said that such progress is possible. Last year, he said, Eylin, who started out at about a third-grade level, left the class at nearly a sixth-grade level.
"About half of that happened between March and June, which is the time she was on the computer," Spevack said.
Twenty-four schools are part of iTeach iLearn, the city's pilot program that helped Levy's school get its technology. Though Levy and his staff only started at the school in 2005, they have already become a traveling team of experts, presenting their results at national and local conferences on instructional technology.
They join a hodgepodge group of educational-technology mavens around the country peddling the promise of the new technology. The group mostly gathers (surprise!) online, through blogs, YouTube, and social-networking sites, including one called Classroom 2.0, where more than 12,000 members share ideas ranging from their thoughts on John Dewey to tips on how to import shots of their computer screens into PowerPoint presentations. The idea that unites them is that new technologies not only move learning from papers to screens, but also enable a transformation in the way students learn.
"The shift is from teachers standing up and telling them stuff, to the 'guide on the side'—kids teaching themselves with the guidance of their teachers and peers," says Marc Prensky, a consultant and author of Don't Bother Me Mom—I'm Learning who has worked on bringing technology to schools around the world. This can mean emphasizing Internet research rather than listening to lectures, and instead of writing in black-and-white composition notebooks never seen by anyone but the teacher, publishing their conclusions and thoughts on a blog for the world to see.
The movement is gaining ground, but it is far from mainstream.
Prensky said one teacher described the technologies he encourages—cell phones, blogs, video games, social networking—as "the new spitballs," and alarm became more fervent in April, when the Pew Research Center published a report saying that 50 percent of American teenagers at one time had used informal writing in school assignments. Twenty-five percent said they had used emoticons in their schoolwork, and 38 percent said they used shortcut phrases like "LOL."
Under Mayor Bloomberg's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, the New York City Department of Education has embraced the 2.0 changes, opening an office of instructional technology stocked with staffers who are ed-tech diehards. But the city's embrace has only been to a degree.
Lisa Nielsen, who manages professional development for the office, has seen some resistance. Though in professional development trainings she teaches city educators how to use cell phones for instructional purposes, the city bans students from bringing cell phones to school. Nielsen has protested the ban on her personal blog, called "The Innovative Educator," though when she added the blog's Web address to her e-mail signature, the Department of Education said department policy dictated a disclaimer saying she did not speak on behalf of the department.
Still, both Nielsen and Prensky say the overwhelming trend is toward the kind of 21st-century classrooms they push for.
The director of instructional technology at the Department of Education, Troy Fischer, said his office is developing a plan for bringing all city schools that are interested under the umbrella of the new technology. About 300 principals have already signed up for a training program called iLead, and Fischer said that by the end of the school year more schools will have been labeled either "Basic," "Proficient," or "Advanced" at their technology progress—and then given help in how to improve their status.
"No longer should students be just absorbers of information, but they should be producers and publishers of information," Fischer says.
Not everyone at 339 bought into the 2.0 project when it kicked off. Some veteran teachers felt technologically illiterate. Even Daniel Ackerman, the assistant principal Jason Levy brought on because he had worked as a technology coach at another school, was skeptical.
"That sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard," Ackerman recalled thinking. "I felt like it was just like MySpace, and I was like, 'Why are we encouraging this?' "
But Ackerman said he quickly shed his doubts. He said the computers engaged the students in a way pencils never had; students who had never come to class started to show up, and others would even tune in when they stayed home sick. "I apologize for not being in today," one student wrote him last year via Google's chat program.
Ackerman claims some dramatic successes at 339, many of them in the area of motivation. "Kids who weren't doing their work were doing their work. Kids who weren't wearing their uniforms were wearing uniforms." Once, in a case that has become legendary, a student who had stayed home for a dentist's appointment even logged on to his lesson from home, after the appointment ended. He didn't want to miss the lesson, and didn't have to, since the assignments were coming in through his Google account.
