It's by far the most widespread, it's in the most schools, and is probably the most successful challenge grant that there is. Y looks at staff development and technology infusion in a different way. If you look at other education reforms of the past, like when we tried to bring the metric system to this country, when we tried to do media literacy to teach students how to watch TV and other media, and when we spent billions of dollars to teach teachers how to do basic programming, and multimedia, very little changed. We know that the Internet would be great for students. With the information and the communication possibilities with people, there's no question about it.
History says no.
Y is that teachers don't need to know technology skills in order to use technology. Perhaps we're wasting a lot of time training teachers to do all these tech skills and software when they could utilize this technology without knowing how to use it. A basketball coach doesn't have to be able to dunk a basketball in order to be a good basketball coach. A teacher doesn't have to know how to make a Web page in order to facilitate Web pages. We're not against teachers learning tech skills if they have the time, but let's face it, there are hundreds of new Web pages coming up every day.