Quotes from Jane E. Pollock

We tend to think that if a student is using a computer as part of an activity, then it's automatically a good activity. After all, they're using technology! But when we look at the results of that time spent at the computer, we really should be asking ourselves, how did this use of technology improve student learning?

I've come to believe that students would benefit more if we moved away from teaching them how to use technology and toward teaching them how to use technology to learn and think.

I believe that with today's technology and resources at our disposal, through this process we can take hope out of schools and replace it with confident action.

How did we get to the point where teachers hope for good results rather than plan for them?

So, what do we need to do to move from using technology to using technology to learn? It's a pedagogical shift to go from designing activities with technology integrated for technology's sake to designing learning experiences with technology integrated to promote innovation and thinking.

Research shows that the average elementary teacher may ask as many as 348 questions a day (Sadker & Sadker, 1982), whereas the students may not ask any.

Today, when our just-right targets are more conceptual, teachers need to employ thinking skills to unravel information that the student has organized and retained. Further, informal self-assessment and observation techniques add to the body of evidence necessary for the teacher to truly know a student's level of performance and for the student to know his or her own level of performance in order to put forth the effort to improve.

When teachers grade by activities, it's nearly impossible to unpack the resulting data to show where the student needs to make gains. However, when teachers score by deconstructing an activity score into different benchmarks in the grade book, patterns emerge and become useful for describing the learner's performance, giving specific feedback about it, and making decisions about what to do next.