I have started off my research online.  I had to stay close to home this week and did not have an opportunity to get to a library.  The information that I found has been quite interesting.  There are many studies and articles about teachers and technology.  While most of these I would not use in a paper, I found a couple that definitely helped define how and when it can be used.

Games Simulations and Social Networking in the Classroom
I found this article very useful.  Most of the information does not pertain to the direct question, it provides a glimpse of the struggle educators have to implement technology on their own.  It is written as a paper, which was nice to read.  It has page numbers and was well laid out.  It was written at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, Jennifer Groff, and Jason Haas.  The paper starts off by saying that today, people of all ages are utilizing technology.  It has led to increased interaction between people, collaboration, and communicating with people from all over the world.  Young kids these days have grown up and grasped this technology in their everyday lives.  It only makes sense that this same technology can be utilized in the classroom.  Simulations and games are used in the business world to train and test employees, why can't it be used in school?

Using technology is a new way to bring students acceptance and excitement into the classroom.  They spend hours a day playing video games at home.  There are educational games that can be used to teach decision making, information processing, and quick thinking.  It can also teach collaboration between people.  Paying attention to consequences and taking responsible actions also are learned.

Though there are many different way to teach, most of them effective, some teachers have been slow to accept this in the classroom.  It is implemented by the teacher in a way that they believe the student will learn best.  There was not always television, or slides, or other multimedia, but it was all accepted at one point.

I thought it would be important to take a paper, not a study, and get an outside educator's view of how technology can be used effectively.  An MIT paper is definitely a good start.  It may be three years old, and much of what they say has already been done, but to get a glimpse of how it is seen by the authors made me ask a lot more questions about the topic.


http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/62/online_stats.htm

This is a study of college students at Wichita State University.  There are two groups of students taking the same class but under different parameters.  One group is taking a "hybrid" class.  The teacher did a lecture at the beginning of each class and then let the students teach amongst themselves.  The second class just had the teacher in the room, but the students had to initiate cooperation and learning themselves.  Each class had the same information and test days.  It seems they used a program much like we do for online learning, but were still in the classroom.  The hypothesis was that the student led learning would provide better scores.  This was not the case, and the "hybrid" class got better test scores, and was more interactive with each other and the website.

While I plan on centering around high school classes, this is an example that I can use as to how important a teacher might be in a technology based class.  Work will still get done, but a teacher might spurn the involvement of everyone around.

As a basic study, I thought this would be useful for at least mentioning, though probably not basing much of my paper on it.