That message comes through in new data from Project Tomorrow, the nonprofit group, once called NetDay, that has surveyed school communities across the United States since 1993.

The Speak Up 2008 survey, conducted last fall, found a huge growth in the numbers of students who say they are completing schoolwork with the help of Web 2.0 tools such as e-mail, IM, and texting (up by 27 percent from 2007), and social networking sites to collaborate with classmates (up by 150 percent from 2007).

It also found that though relatively few students currently engage in online learning, many more (40 percent of high schoolers, 35 percent of middle schoolers, and 15 percent of upper-elementary students) are interested in taking an online class.

In the survey results released Tuesday, students said they were not satisfied with the technology use at their schools.

Students singled out, as the prime obstacles to technology use: school filters and firewalls, which block Web sites they need; teachers limiting their use of technology; school rules barring students from using their own devices, accessing their communications tools, and even limiting the use of school technology.

Students said their school could give them the greatest assist toward working electronically by letting them use their own laptops, cellphones, or other mobile devices. Second, schools could help by providing students with unlimited Internet access, and third, by letting them access their school projects from any computer, at home or school, according to the survey.

Julie Evans, the CEO of Project Tomorrow, presented the findings on Capitol Hill, at a House-side meeting room full of mostly youthful congressional staffers, who presumably work on education and technology issues for members of Congress.

At the meeting, which I attended, Evans said many of the 868 participating school districts are using their data, and the national comparisons, to inform their decisions on spending their federal economic stimulus funding, some of which can be used for technology.

The online survey was completed by 281,500 K-12 students from all 50 states, but it was not just students who were speaking. An additional 29,644 teachers, 21,309 parents, and 3,114 school administrators provided their views, which make for some interesting contrasts. Educators, for example, were much more sanguine, compared to students and parents, about how well students are being prepared for their futures.

Laptops Top the Want List

As in years past, students at every grade level said that the No. 1 technology tool or service that would impact their learning would be a laptop for their personal use at school and at home.

But Evans said that she interprets the laptop demand as “a proxy or a gateway to having control over technology.”

She said students want technology in order to create: 1. untethered learning, 2. new learning spaces, 3. social-based learning, 4. relevancy through digital resources, 5. and learning beyond classroom walls.

Editor’s Note: I will attempt to post a few data charts from the survey over the next few days, as I figure out how to do it technically.–AT

And next week: Mobile phones in the classroom.

Educators in Ventura County, in Southern California, and the Bering Straits district, in Alaska, are both working in this vein, though with different twists.

Ventura County has partnered with the National Park Service to connect students to nature on the hard-to-visit Channel Islands, 14 miles off the coast of Southern California, according to Catharine Reznicek, an educational technology specialist in the county’s office of education, who was presenting at the Consortium for School Networking conference last week.

The islands, a national park surrounded by a marine sanctuary, have biodiversity that can be compared to that of the Galapagos, said Reznicek.

For Channel Islands Live, park service divers conduct underwater tours, with video captured on submersible cameras and broadcast live to students, usually gathered in school cafeterias; the students in turn can ask the divers questions. In a related project, the “EagleCAM” on one of the islands sends a live Web video feed of the activities of nesting bald eagles, with audio via a microphone mounted beneath the nest.

The broadcasts from the remote site are made possible by a 18 mile point-to-point microwave link from Anacapa Island to the mainland. The county office, which provides Internet service for 21 school districts, set up the system beginning in April 2008, according to Steve Carr, the education office’s executive director of technology.

“Our goal was to use content to sell the technology,” Carr said. “While we were working on technological solutions, we were trying to do exciting content.”

Costs of the communications system were subsidized by the federal E-rate program. The Webcam project received funds from a legal settlement involving a chemical company that had accused of releasing the pesticide DDT into local waters and harming the bald eagle population, Mr. Carr said.

Broadcasting Alaska

The Bering Straits project–in a school district of 16 villages spread across a territory the size of Great Britain, with water barriers and no connecting roads–puts the cameras in students’ hands.

“We’re taking very remote communities of our students and connecting them to outside world,” John Concilus, the director of educational technology, said in his presentation.

To cross one expanse of sea, the district’s Internet provider set up a 32 mile microwave link.

The district’s schools already had robust wireless networks, which they use to take part in 2-way video conferences with sites, such as the squid lab at the Alaska sea life center, a farm, and medical centers, where students have witnessed open-heart and knee replacement surgeries and autopsies.

The experiences are complemented by learning resources that students and teachers compile and key to district academic standards on a wiki. Students have also created a multimedia visual dictionary, including pronunciation in indigenous languages.

District students also cater to a broader audience through documentaries they have produced on local activities, such as whaling.

An annual highlight is students’ coverage of the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog  Race, now  under way, which traverses the district. Student broadcasters become part of the entourage of the race, interviewing the mushers and reporting on each day’s events, using a popup satellite dish, a remote steerable Webcam on a pole, and other equipment hauled by a snow machine on a custom-built sled.

On the district’s IditaProject wiki, students post information on the history and culture of mushing, statistics they have compiled about the race, and a customized Google Earth map that allows visitors to track the mushers.

The site has a global audience, and the related IditaProject Forum, which the district started in the project’s first year, has received over 17000 posts worldwide.

“By allowing our students to create content for a real audience and get credit toward our standards, it’s very powerful for teachers and their students,” Concilus said of the project.

The international symposium on March 10, the first day at CoSN, made clear that the U.S. is not alone in wrestling with those issues. Educators are having the same discussions in Australia, Britain, Singapore, the Scandanavian nations, and undoubtedly many other countries.

One perceptive speaker was Stephen Breslin, a Briton who is the chief executive of Futurelab, a nonprofit group based in Bristol, U.K., that supports innovation in education.

Breslin, on a panel on global perspectives, noted that his own schooling never prepared him on three topics that have proved vital to him in the workplace: the power of conversation, the power of groups, and the power of the network. Schools are ill-equipped to teach those things because they are geared for assessing students individually, he suggested.

But Web 2.0 tools are designed to highlight the educational power of conversation, groups, and the network.

Like other speakers, Breslin acknowledged dangers to children posed by Web 2.0, but said educators should not be paralyzed by fears. People are responding to Web 2.0, just as to earlier digital innovations, “polarized between panic and blind digital faith.” He added, “The answer is balanced in between.”

Students are adopting these tools anyway, at home if not at school. As evidence, he presented a fascinating chart from a 2008 research study by Becta, formally the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency.

The chart showing that students’ are engaging in computer-related activity far more outside than inside school–even for doing schoolwork.

He described examples of how Web-based tools, such as Wikipedia, grew massively after the creators relinquished much of their control of them.  “You can only achieve the scale you need if you relinquish control,” if enough people are keen on creating this shared resource, he said. “Over time there will be enough improvement” in quality.

His advice to school leaders: Reward the innovators; risk-takers will eventually bring  change to the mindsets of others.

That’s all for now. CoSN will finish up today without me, but over the next few days I will post other summaries and tidbits from my observations, though my schedule will be a bit irregular.

CoSN has a quality program each year, and the scale of the meeting is small enough that you don’t feel absolutely mind-boggled by the end, as you do at some of the mega-conferences in this field. And there’s a good chance that people you meet will have attended some of the same sessions, beyond the keynoters, which aids in conversation.

Yesterday, March 10, I took in most of the related international symposium—titled “Does Web 2.0 Belong in Schools?” I’ll be at the regular CoSN program today, but need to miss tomorrow to attend a funeral in NYC. As time permits, over the next week I will blog about some of the presentations, ideas, and personalities that impressed me at the conference.

An obvious assertion? Perhaps so, but the notion that technology can succeed where teachers failed is a persistent idea, which many vendors of ed-tech “solutions” do not try to discourage.

What’s more, educational software developers have sometimes told me, a reporter, that their products are a kind of scaffold to good instruction, as well as a source of solid curriculum content—as if they are aware that not all teachers can be trusted to provide either.

And I suspect, though I don’t know for sure, that some school administrators scheme to introduce technology as way to give a classroom a workaround to a mediocre teacher.

Capable teachers, adequately trained in technology, can make a make just about every technology application more effective. In one sense, they can function as a clutch does on a gear-shift car, smoothing the operation of the mechanism to suit the needs of the students. In another sense, they can take over when the equivalent of a car’s electronic navigation system gets fooled by recent road construction or another anomaly. (And of course, they synthesize the technology experience into the broader presentation of the curriculum.)

Conversely, mediocre or underprepared teachers, or worse, easily swamp the educational benefits of the most carefully wrought and tested digital simulation or online exploration of the curriculum.

Online schools certainly know this; they are aggressively recruiting the best teachers—those who also have tech savvy—from brick-and-mortar schools.

But even in the most teched-out traditional classrooms, teachers just have too many points of influence with students not to be a powerful force.

That’s why advocates of technology in education can be hopeful, now that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is declaring teacher improvement to be at the top of his agenda. You can hear him discuss teaching, along with other aspects of educational improvement, in his radio appearance on “On Point with Tom Ashbrook,” last Thursday.

As Duncan noted in the interview, there are lots of elements to teacher improvement—such as higher salaries, incentives for teaching in rural and urban schools, and new-teacher preparation.

On that last point, I recently heard James G. Cibulka, the president of the National Council on the Accreditation of Teacher Education, talk about using the accreditation of new-teacher preparation and certification program that process as “a lever for reform.”

Most new-teacher programs in the United States are run by colleges and universities, and they are shaped to a great degree by state regulations on teacher-licensing, as well as by NCATE’s standards.

Cibulka outlined his plan at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, where he spoke on Feb. 26, to focus accreditation on producing teacher candidates who can deliver rigorous content, hold high expectations of students, succeed with diverse learners (including low-income and non-English learners), assess student learning, differentiate instruction, and draw on extensive clinical (student-teaching) experience.

He also noted that NCATE was working to open up teacher preparation wider—beyond colleges and universities—to nontraditional teacher-education programs, such as those run by nonprofit groups or even schools.

Incidentally, an article describing three alternative programs for preparing new teachers, including High Tech High Charter School, in San Diego, which operates its own new-teacher preparation program, is in the spring 2009 issue of Education Next, AEI’s journal. I recommend the piece, by Katherine Newman, a teacher and former New York City Teaching Fellow.

I am far from an expert on teacher quality—so please offer your thoughts and correctives. But I believe anyone who cares about the quality of education and the role of technology needs to keep a close eye on the issue.

This blog, launching today, is about how those processes interrelate, and how they are tied to other key issues in K-12 education.

Digital Education Today will explore its subject by flagging and commenting on current news and issues of technology and policy, and by telling stories from the places where teaching and learning occur. It will aim regularly to test the notion—which never seems to die—that the latest innovation will be a silver bullet that erases problems without further human effort or expense.

That result almost never happens, I observed in 12 years as a reporter and assistant editor at Education Week newspaper, ending in January. That stint also included writing for its sister magazine, Digital Directions, and for all 12 of the annual “Technology Counts” reports, which since 1996 have shed light on developments in classroom tools, assessment, STEM education, online learning, international programs, and other areas.

In those years, and years before that as a writer for other education magazines, I talked to hundreds of students, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and industry experts about the links between technology and education.

I hope to continue those conversations, while working as a freelance writer, and to pass along what I learn that you may find valuable. I also invite you to share your discoveries, concerns, and news tips on technology and education—by posting comments here or by e-mailing me directly at atrotter@digitaleducationtoday.com.

Thanks.