• How many teachers does it take to screw in a new high-tech low-consumption halogen light bulb?
• Don't bother, I'll sit in the dark.

Contrary to our critics, we are not sitting in the dark.

Productivity

Teachers are searching for ways to be more productive, to get their students to learn more in less time. Foreign language teachers in Massachusetts put vocabulary lessons on their students' iPods and see a marked increase in retention. English teachers tell me they have learned to correct papers online, analyzing 30 papers on their computer in the time it took them to do 15 by hand on paper. With longer, more readable comments. History teachers have gathered all their maps into a searchable database, and can display any one at a moment's notice onto the classroom wall. Art historians organize their paintings in iPhoto, with better quality, faster access, and more selection than with books or slides.

Communication

Teachers use the new technologies to communicate among themselves and with their students. They carry out union business and conduct office hours using instant messenger. They collaborate online across state boundaries to author new curriculum materials. The collection of teacher-developed investigations at webquest.org is a useful example. Teachers are learning to use the same channels and devices as business and students.

Research

Teachers are finding information in more places. It used to be that we drew our teaching materials from our head, from the textbook, and from the library (in that order). Many teachers reach well beyond that now, employing the Internet to bring more perspectives to bear on the subject at hand, to bring more original sources into the classroom. The French course at the local high school now begins each class with a reading aloud of the front page of that day's Le Monde, followed by a grammatical and cultural analysis of the content. Online research is an everyday part of these teachers' work.

Media

Teachers are learning how to find the best array of media to teach a topic, and to bring it into the classroom so that students can see the same idea in a variety of forms. The new technologies let them let the medium fit the message. The mathematician manipulates the Cartesian plane on the SmartBoard, the music teacher transposes Tchaikovsky for the tenth-grade trumpeter in a tenth of a second, and the English teacher shows varying shades of Shakespeare through video analysis of classic performances. And all of this is done on a single machine, in a common digital format.

Publishing

Teachers are telling their stories with the new technologies. They compose slide shows, post web sites, produce podcasts, and present and publish them to their students. They follow this up by assigning their students to author the same type of report.

These teachers are focusing the light of the new technologies first on themselves, so that they might develop some new skills of their own. Then they proceed to refract and redirect the light of their own clusters of students, previously shining on trivia and trash, toward more serious and academic subjects.