Reflection on the potential for schools without technology

In a conversation with my mother, who is an elementary school teacher in the Gig Harbor area, about technology in education.  I posed a question that had been going on in my mind for a while.  What do you do if the school doesn't or refuses, because of budget problems, to provide adequate technology in your classroom.  While technology in education classrooms is going up and the use of technology by the current generation is certainly going up, out economy is not.  States are having to cut budgets like crazy and while the kids are the future of America what the states have to worry about are debts that are quickly making education back burner issue so to speak.  Huge budget deficits such as the one in Washington which is upwards of 8 Billion dollars rather put a damper on what then seems like unnecessary expense for technology in classrooms.  So what if they stop funding the use of technology in classrooms, stop providing smart boards, document cameras, or even projectors?  What do we do when the only technology in our classroom is the crappy dell computer in the back of the room?

My suggestion is that even though the states technology budget will very likely go through the floor in terms of what they spend on technology (or even teachers), the kids will still very likely have computers at home that you will be able to integrate into your lessons in terms of projects and other online creative stuff such as blogs and websites.  So essentially what we will see is a move back to a few years ago when the library was the biggest repository of computers in the school and classes have a time where they go into a computer lab at designated times.

All of this is to say Be very careful about what you hinge your teaching ability or students learning ability on, it shouldn't be technology, but rather the subjects that students need to learn.  If you hinge your ability to teach or the ability of the students to learn on the expectation of a smart board or any other tool then you will be in for a shock if you end up not having one and the students will be worse off for it.