The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet?

Larry Cuban returns with fresh energy and insight to one of his perennial topics: the uses and effects of digital technologies in K-12 classrooms. Cuban has an extensive track record as a skeptic about the educational consequences of those technologies. In this book, he returns to this topic by exploring the uses of these technologies in notably ambitious classrooms, all of them in schools in the heart of Silicon Valley. The book looks carefully at 41 classrooms in all, located in twelve schools in six different districts. All have devoted special attention and resources to integrating digital technologies in their education practices. Cuban observed all of these classrooms and interviewed all of the teachers in an effort to answer several straightforward, if also elusive, questions: has technology integration been fully implemented and put into practice in these classrooms? And has this integration and implementation resulted in altered teaching practices? Ultimately, Cuban asks if the use of digital technologies has resulted in transformed teaching and learning in these classrooms. The answers to these questions reflect both Cuban's nuanced understanding not only of digital technologies and their uses, but of the complex interrelations of policy and practice, and of the many, often unintended, consequences of reforms and initiatives in the education world. Similarly, his answers reflect his subtle understanding of change and continuity in education practice, and of the varying ways in which different actors in the education world--policy makers, school leaders, teachers, and others--understand, and sometimes misinterpret, those changes. --