Education and technology: transforming storm clouds into possibilities.

Technology has always been important in education. Our current school organization, with its highly disciplined curriculum ; with its cycles, courses and levels; its groups of more or less homogeneous students and the spatial disposition of the classrooms, owes much to what has been, with the permission of the nineteenth-century blackboard, the most efficient educational technology of all time: the textbook.

In any approach to the subject of education and technology, it is important, therefore, not to get carried away by the amnesia, so usual in our educational world, and not forget that there has always been a close relationship between education and technology. That this has been, on many occasions, considered the perfect ally for educational change and that, at least in the last 100 years, every time a new information and communication technology has appeared (cinema, radio, TV, personal computers, tablets) has been seen as an opportunity and a privileged lever for change and educational improvement. In the history of educational change, there has always been a lot of technology.

It is also worth remembering that in recent decades numerous governments around the world have launched ambitious technology implementation programs, investing large financial and material resources in providing devices and training centres, classrooms and teachers. These are investments that, far from causing the expected changes, have strengthened, in many cases, the more traditional approaches to teaching. It is worth remembering that, despite the large investments and the high hopes placed on technology as a lever for change, this has not fulfilled the expected role. The desired and necessary educational change through technology has been, until now, an unfulfilled promise

Being aware of this history, with its lights and shadows, should not lead us to be pessimistic about the transforming potential of technology in education or, of course, to abandon the pretense of educating with and in technologies . Especially when these, far from being simply a toolbox, are defining a new learning environment (and life) that, among other consequences, is expanding the concept of literacy, modifying our relationship with content, demanding new ways of teaching -learning and blurring the boundaries between the classroom and the home, the formal and the informal.

The debate on education and technology is probably more necessary and relevant than ever. Our challenge is to redefine education for this new world.

There are also several reasons to think that this time the situation may be different. The last decades have allowed us to better understand the processes of educational change and school improvement, highlighting the importance of the educational centre as a unit of change and the need to build and develop the internal capacity for change in schools, involving teachers, management teams and families. It has also greatly increased what we know about learning processes (and therefore how we should teach), understanding that learning has a lot to do with attitudes, beliefs, emotional tolerance and values.