The next question is what do they do with them. President Clinton vows to have all classrooms hooked up to the Internet by the year 2000.
School districts invest millions in educational hardware and software.
Hard-pressed urban schools struggle to keep up. Consider two schools recently visited by one observer. In a city classroom, kids were doing word-processed reports not much different from those they once wrote with pen on paper. In a suburban school, the class was researching immigration using Internet sources, making spreadsheets to see how immigrant families coped, using a database to track their descendants, and word-processing the final reports. She will study innovative midwestern city and suburban schools to examine whether student experiences of technology differ even when resources are similar.