21st Century Schools or 21st Century Learning?

I read this and thinking about the discussion we had last class. I think business is really ahead of education itself. It means benefit/profit is always the first consideration in our society. We need more research before spend any money. I can't believe government try to cut the art class in Chicago.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/21st-century-schools-or-learning-george-couros

This has really been weighing on my mind since I started seeing a lot of iPads in schools in a 1:1 environment. I asked a group of students at one school how they were using their devices, and they told me that they now had their textbooks on the iPad. They also told me that they didn't like having the iPads because there were so many other things to do on the device that they couldn't stay focused.

Pretty crazy since they'd been given an online textbook to keep them entertained!

The mass purchase of devices for schools is happening way too often without conversations with educators about what learning should be happening in the classroom. This is actually frustrating many teachers that I have spoken with; it just becomes another thing being dumped on educators, not something that is going to make learning better. There is definitely some value in playing with a device and figuring out the wonderful things it can do, but should we really buy these en masse for that purpose? Shouldn't we try to figure out what the learning looks like and then discuss the device? It seems sometimes that we are doing the exact opposite.