This post first appeared on aud.life
I left this comment for "A Proposal for Proponents of Ed Tech" -- it's a reminder that I wish Known would be a federated system for commenting, so that if I left a comment on a site I would always have a version here.
It sounds as though you teach at a school where students have a great deal of opportunity. And as the world operates as it does, that already gives your students advantages that "more technology in the classroom" probably really change. "Exposure to technology" and all its affordances sound like something that's already part of your students' lives -- at home and in the classroom. And more importantly, "more technology" certainly doesn't mean "more student-centeredness," which I think you allude to already. Student-centeredness is a pedagogical and political decision -- and in many ways too a reflection of the privileged circumstances in which you work and in which your students get to live and learn.
I think "tech for tech's sake" is silly. I can't say "you must use it; the future demands it." To me, arguments for ed-tech full of buzzwords about tech as facilitating "collaboration" and "creation" ring empty too. Technologies can easily reinforce the rules of a rigid and sterile classroom. Just because a teacher tweets doesn't mean they're progressive or on the cutting edge of anything. Just because a student writes an essay in Google Docs doesn't mean she gets a checkmark for successfully incorporating tech into her learning. Most of ed-tech does hand out a checkmark for tool usage; and I think you're right to hesitate.
That being said, I do think there are interesting projects that can be done with computers in a high school history class. And I don't mean typing up essays or looking up sources on the Web. I mean a more in-depth pursuit of how a digital world might reshape how we "know" and how we represent the past -- through things like computation, algorithmic analysis of resources, mapping and GIS, digital archiving, metadata, historical preservation of "born digital" items, changing access to primary sources, "original copies," ownership and IP, oral history ("what counts" as oral now?), "memory" (computer vs human), storytelling (does hyperlinking change linearity, for example?), museum work and aesthetics, identity, privacy, institutional history and information security, changes to scholarship (is the essay still relevant?) and to knowledge generation, history-according-to-wikipedia, and so on. These involve (I think) sophisticated thinking with and about history and tech.
I think the field of history will surely change because of new technologies that change the "work" that historians do. History as a field and a discipline has, of course, always been in flux (and not simply because the College Board decided what was on the AP exam.) Are most history professor at college "digital historians"? LOL. No. But hey... Maybe your students can take their jobs :)
For what it's worth, unlike Tom, I do not believe that technology is speeding things up or making what we do traditionally as scholars or teachers de facto irrelevant. I don't think we know what the future will hold. We don't know what technologies our students will use -- we aren't responsible to train them in the usage of tools (maybe a graduate degree in history does more of this. maybe.) What a depressing idea to suggest that's what ed-tech is: training in how to tweet.
History gives us an opportunity to understand our past and understand how our storytelling frames the present and the future. It's worth helping students think about how their own individual, personal pasts might be different -- their own memories -- because of the persistence of certain artifacts and because of the fragility of others. That's not a "college-prep history" thing per se. But it is, I think, one of the values of studying history: so we can understand ourselves now.