“We’ve wired the schools — now what?” This question resonates with educators, and troubles them at the same time. After countless local and national efforts have boosted the infrastructure of our schools, the significant issues now arise. Should we continue to pump money into educational technology for our schools? Do computers really help students learn? How can students and teachers best learn from the World Wide Web and its content? These questions are not new, nor unique to the dawn of Internet-connected schools. Earlier technologies, This evidence is but a taste of the rich and compelling research studies that demonstrate students learning from technology. Regardless of the means—be it television or computer, or even computer-delivered streaming video—when content is presented with purpose, the student can experience the content and attach the new information to that which is already known. This process of creating associations and making meaning is part of learning. Educational technologies expand our access to new information and support our efforts to make meaning.
On September 29, 1989, leaders of the cable industry—38 CEOs in all—sat together to found the Cable Alliance for Education, a non-profit foundation with a mission to support excellent education work across the industry. It was indeed an alliance—a national consortium of cable operators and networks—aimed at serving teachers and students in K-12 schools across the country, and based on the premise that powerful technology and rich content can help make learning happen.
The cable industry’s unfaltering commitment to education has continued from that day to this. And this Alliance for Education, renamed Cable in the Classroom, now stands at the threshold of its own renaissance. Our own revitalization began with fresh perspective and a simple question: given the last decade’s developments in learning theory and technology, and given technology’s pervasiveness in schools, how can we reshape and refocus our work in a way that will benefit learners to the greatest extent possible? We are led by an educational philosophy, which holds that every student and teacher has a right to five elements essential to a good education in the 21st century:
• Visionary and sensible use of technology to extend learning
• Engagement with deep, rich content
• Membership in a meaningful community of learners
• Excellent teaching
• Support of parents and other adults.
As the founders of Cable in the Classroom were in 1989, we are still compelled by the explosion of media and developing technologies and their power to affect learning. And as always, we are driven by the absolute truth that good teaching and good learning are the most potent forces on earth. Without them, After 30 years on the Columbia University faculty, I now spend all my time examining the learning outcomes available from technology. Despite that concentration, I still benefited from Marshall’s close analysis of how technology advances learning. At a time when landmark federal legislation—the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2002—makes 110 references to “evidence-based” decisions about teaching and learning, this review of the empirical data is particularly helpful.
Technology is anything that extends human capability. Technology got started when chimpanzees concluded that a stick in the fist was more persuasive than an empty hand. People continue to debate the merits of learning technology in policy forums and in practical settings. Marshall’s review of the dynamics beneath the uneven trajectory of classroom adoption of technology is apt, particularly when coupled with the evidence he assembles about the positive contributions of TV. Like any technology, TV can be turned to purposes that are bad, indifferent, or good. Marshall does everyone a service in recalling our attention to the positive gains from this ubiquitous medium.
Whatever the outcomes of adult pondering, we are fortunate to be led by little children. Consider the dominance of technology platforms in the responses of 6- to 11-year-olds to the question, “What makes a new subject in school most interesting to me?”
• Internet 34%
• TV program 24%
• Teacher 26%
• Textbook 12%
Source: USA Today
Ask a child to picture “learning,” and the classroom and the teacher naturally come to mind. Classrooms, teachers, desks, paper, and pencil are all part of the traditional learning environment. The past century has supplemented and enriched this traditional environment with new ways of presenting content for learning.
Today, opportunities abound for learning through multiple media—from pictures, overhead projectors, and filmstrips to moving pictures, videos, and computers. And yet, do these educational technologies and the content that they provide result in learning? Extensive research into learning with technology provides conclusive evidence that people can, and do, learn from educational technologies. Our exploration of educational technology begins with “Highlights in the Evolution of Educational
Technology,” an abbreviated history of technological developments across the 20th century. We limit the focus to technologies employed for educative pursuits. Historical evidence suggests that technology can, and did, teach.
“The Process of Learning: A Learning Primer” provides a buffet of theories that address how people learn. We discuss learning as both a neurological process and a result of interacting with the environment around us.

Highlights in The Evolution of Educational Technology
The term “educational technology” often brings to mind the hard technologies—the tangible “stuff”— used for teaching and presenting content — in other words, the medium. From simple graphical illustrations and projectors for film and filmstrip alike, to the more complex Internet-surfing computers, these tools are central to the educational technology equation. These devices share a rich history; their development and evolution into the 21st century are punctuated with applications to traditional and nontraditional learning endeavors.
Although this early history emphasizes hard technologies, these tools would be an unsuccessful means for learning without the content they deliver. As we review selective moments in history, note the shift from interest in the technology to a focus on the content the technology provides, suggesting that the media may not be the only message.
Although use of visual illustrations for learning can be identified long before the 20th century, the birth of technology-based learning coincides with audiovisual media being introduced into U.S. schools in the early 1900s (Reiser, 1987). In some cases, technology-based learning entered educational institutions through “school museums.” These forerunners to today’s school media center served as repositories for visual instruction. They distributed portable museum exhibits, stereographs, slides, films, study prints, charts, and other materials designed to enhance instruction (Saettler, 1968). References to “visual education” can be found as early as 1908, when the Keystone View Company’s publication Visual Education guided teachers’ use of lantern slides and stereographs (Saettler, 1968).
This history provides evidence that learning can result from the use of educational technologies. Early use of these “tools of learning” provided tangible results and prompted interest in the increasing potential for learning by technology.

The Process of Learning: A Learning Primer
Unbearable disturbance or saving radiance? Although E.B. White may have never imagined television entering our classrooms to educate, query educators about classroom use of technology and you will uncover evidence to support either of White’s assertions. Educators who hold the belief that technology supports learning use educational technologies. Those who lack such beliefs may consider it an unbearable disturbance.
Today’s movement to hold teachers accountable for student learning places considerable pressure on teachers to ensure increases in each student’s knowledge and abilities. Teachers need proof that multimedia experiences can support increases in knowledge—powerful increases if employed thoughtfully and with purpose.
Such proof begins with understanding how people learn and how this process of learning is a natural match to the content that educational technologies can present. Learning changes the brain anatomically; with each new stimulation, experience, and behavior, it can rewire itself. Because we are all raised in different environments with different experiences, each brain is unique.
Even identical twins do not have identical brains. It is also worth noting how this “making of associations” parallels the research literature that addresses motivation and design of effective technology-based instruction. Establishing relevance to the instructional content is the second component of John Keller’s (1998) ARCS model, a system for improving the motivational appeal of instructional materials. Malone and
Lepper (1987) created a heuristic for designing intrinsically motivating learning environments that identifies features needed to enhance individual and interpersonal motivations. To enhance individual motivation, the heuristic calls for developing appropriate levels of challenge and feedback in the design of the instruction.
In this section, we’ve made the point that learning is the process of making connections.
• The brain is constantly working to make associations between existing knowledge and new information it receives.
• Educational technology can employ diverse approaches to support this process of learning.
• Storytelling is an ancient and proven strategy used to scaffold information and knowledge, facilitating the transfer from one person to another.
• Presenting information in multiple modalities (audio, visual, textual) can increase the chance that learning will occur.
• People generally remember 10 percent of what they read, 20 percent of what they hear, 30 percent of what they see, and 50 percent of what they hear and see.
• Active viewing of media by children is not a simple response but is a complex, cognitive activity that develops and matures with the child’s development to promote learning.
The ability of media to engage the learner, activate emotional states, initiate interest in a topic, and allow for absorption and processing of information shares a direct relationship to the potential that learning will occur.

Research-Based Evidence: Learning with Educational Technology
Research evaluating technology and learning has a long history. The beginnings date back to the Payne Fund
studies of the 1930s, one of the first large-scale efforts to investigate media’s role in influencing people (Krendl, Ware, Reid, and Warren, 1996). Study findings supported the potential of the film as an informal learning instrument. These studies linked a film’s ability to educate with a combination of important qualities inherent in the medium: wide variation in content, gripping narrative techniques, and an appeal to basic human motives and wishes.
The expansion of television programming and viewing in the mid-20th century set the stage for investigating how television entertainment impacted children. Schramm, Lyle, and Parker conducted the first major exploration of this premise in 1961 (as cited in Krendl et al., 1996). The study emphasized how children learn from television viewing and developed the concept of “incidental learning.” Although the viewer’s intent is entertainment, he or she stores up certain information without seeking it and learning occurs in spite of the intention of the program or of the viewer.
In their summary chapter of the book “G” is for growing: Thirty years of research on children and Sesame Street, Fisch and Truglio (2001) point to “a consistent pattern of significant effects” (p. 233) in academic areas, emergent literacy, school readiness, and social behaviors. This was seen in the very first studies conducted in the early 1970s by Ball and Bogatz (1970; Bogatz and Ball, 1971) who demonstrated that the children who watched the most, learned the most.
This was true regardless of age, viewing, geographic location, socioeconomic status, or gender. Numerous subsequent studies have further demonstrated the positive impact of Sesame Street viewing on children’s learning and school readiness (see box on page 17). Today, Sesame Street remains as popular and as relevant as ever.
Consequences curriculum (the curriculum group), and 10 classrooms did not (the control group). A predesign and postdesign assessed students’ legal knowledge, empathy, perceptions of risk, and antisocial behavior.
The study documented the following results:
Choices and Consequences impacted students’ acquisition of legal terms and the American court system; participating students demonstrated understanding of an additional eight legal terms on average, compared with no change in the control group.
Although both groups demonstrated similar scores regarding “empathy toward other people” as measured by the pretest, students participating in the program scored appreciably higher on the posttest, while control group empathy scores remained essentially unchanged.
This section has presented diverse results of research proving that students can and do learn from educational technology. The following research results are among the significant findings that support this conclusion:
• Watching the television program Blue’s Clues has strong effects on developing preschool viewers’ flexible thinking, problem solving, and prosocial behaviors when they are compared with children who do not watch the program (Bryant et al., 1998).
• Court TV’s Choices and Consequences program reduced middle school students’ verbal aggression, including tendencies to tease, swear at, and argue with others (Wilson et al., 1999).
• Viewing Sesame Street was positively associated with subsequent performance in reading, mathematics, vocabulary, and school readiness (Wright, Huston, and Kotler, 2001).
• A “recontact” study with a sample of 15- to 20-year-olds found that those who had been frequent viewers of Sesame Street at age 5 had significantly better grades in English, scienceand mathematics; read more books for pleasure; and had higher motivation to achievement (Huston et al., 2001).
• Students show greater achievement on standardized tests after using computers for mathematics problem solving (Clouse, 1991–92; Phillips and Soule, 1992).
• Remedial reading students using computer reading games for reinforcement and remediation showed significant knowledge gains and improved attitudes toward reading (Arroyo, 1992; Nixon, 1992).
• Learning-disabled (LD) students using computer simulations score significantly higher than traditionally taught students (both LD and non-LD) on recall of basic information and problem-solving skills (Woodward, Carnine, and Gersten, 1988).
• Use of educational technologies accounts for at least 11 percent of the total variance in the basic skills achievement gain scores of fifth- grade students, as measured in a 10-year West Virginia statewide study (Mann et al., 1999

View from the Future: Emerging Technologies
The number of connections in schools is also increasing. Previously, a “connected” school may have had a single Internet access point, often in the school office.
Today, more than 82 percent of schools nationwide have Internet access in one or more classrooms. In fact, the amount of connectivity in these particular schools is even more encouraging: on average, 80 percent of the classrooms are connected to the Internet (Education Week, 2001).
In the future, classrooms and schools will continue to expand in the types and amounts of technologies available, and teachers will be challenged even more to appropriately integrate technologies into their curricula.
Increased broadband Internet access and enhanced computers in schools will increase the use of technologies that merge video and desktop computing, such as webcasts, videoconferencing, digital movie making, and digital TV. Handheld computing and wireless technologies have also made entry into the classroom. Already, a small number of schools and classrooms are beginning to tap into these newer technologies. Below, we briefly highlight and review some of these new technologies and envision their contribution to learning.
This section has briefly explored the potential of new and emerging technologies and imagined the contributions they may bring to educational pursuits. These new technologies will increase our access to information and to other people, prompting new ways of learning and new understanding. Teachers will need to ensure that students not only learn but also learn how to learn. This ability will be their competitive advantage in the information era.

Conclusion
This paper has offered conclusive evidence that educational technologies impact learning. From early 20th-century classroom examples, training films, and mainframe computers to Sesame Street, Court TV’s Choices and Consequences, and the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow, it has been proven that when technology is employed purposefully for defined outcomes, it can support and facilitate learning.
At the same time, learning is not a guaranteed outcome. Lack of purpose in the design of instructional content and the strategies employed to present that content in a technology-based environment can cause programs to fail. And once in the classroom, even a well-designed program can fail. With everincreasing choices for both technology (i.e., films, video, multimedia, or Internet) and content, the need is unprecedented for thoughtful, purposeful use, carefully aligned with complementary classroom instruction and desired learning outcomes.
Knowing that educational technology does result in learning, perhaps the question we should now ponder is how we can optimize learning with technology—before the content reaches the classroom and once it is in the hands of students and teachers. The recipe for success goes beyond technology and content to the learner, the teacher, and the environment in which technology is employed.
As technology continues to advance, we have ever-increasing opportunities to present content and to create rich, technology-based environments and experiences where learning can occur. Technology can take us to new places; technology can support new connections with others around the world, which means new perspectives and experiences. Such opportunities will certainly result in many types of learning for children. The need to design new research methods and techniques that support further understanding of how people learn from technology and how educators can use technology to support learning endeavors will continue to challenge. Thoughtful attention to the content that is developed and the availability of that content to students via technology will enable educators to ensure that such opportunities benefit the learning of children in their charge.