Jason Wheeler is one of the teachers I interviewed for the education chapter in Totally Wired. When I interviewed him, he was teaching Texas history and a multimedia class to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at Dan F. Long Middle School in Dallas, Texas. Long is a Title I School, which means that more than 40 percent of the school is on free or reduced lunch, and that white students are in the minority. Long also received a $300 million dollar technology bond two years ago, which means they are decked out when it comes to the latest and greatest tech. What was interesting was what Jason said about the challenges of getting teachers to actually leverage all of this technology at school.

"For the younger teachers who have been around computers their whole life, they can handle the training, but the older teachers have trouble just turning the computers on. So when they get in the classroom, they are scared or nervous to use it."

Not to generalize, because I don't believe all older teachers struggle with this issue and that some younger teachers do struggle with it as well, but just having the latest, greatest equipment isn't enough. Training teachers on how to use it in innovative ways should be part of those big bonds.

Jason also talked about the challenge of becoming too dependent on technology to keep at-risk students engaged when many of his students "still can't use complete sentences or spell."

On a positive note, Jason is now teaching at a high school in the same district and sent me the following photographs showing me how some students in his district are using technology to learn about media. He wrote:

"I wanted to show you the set-up we have in my high school classrooms. The program is called the Academy of Media Arts and Technology. It is a program that was developed in our district to expose our students to media technology which includes video production, radio production, and other types of multimedia. Anyone in the district can apply and be accepted into the program. There are criteria we follow to admit students.

We have a fully functional TV studio with control room and a radio station. We also have both PC and Mac editing rooms to create films and other video productions. The PC editing labs have Adobe Premeire and the Apple Labs have Final Cut Pro 5.1 working on Intel mac pros."

The TV studio

The radio station

Using Final Cut Pro

Update: The MacArthur Foundation posted three forums as part of its focus on digital media and learning where they asked educators the following questions:

1. If you were free to use digital media to teach in any way you wanted, how would you use it?
2. What currently limits your use of digital media in the classroom?
3. What has surprised you about you students' digital media use?

The answers they received (the forums are now closed) are worth checking out.