Time to ditch the outdated computer lab and use the technology in students' pockets.

When we started the conversation about technology integration into classrooms in 1990, %15 of homes in the US had a computer and by 1994, %2 had internet access.

Compare this to 2008, when close to %80 of the households in the US had internet access and broadband penetration across the country had reached %90 by the start of 2009.

There has been so much change in technology and particularly, in our access to it, yet the conversation about classroom integration seems to have changed relatively little. Whereas, in the 90's, it may have made sense for schools to try to add the role of teacher-of-technology to their other responsibilities, in the rush to get equipped, schools only found themselves in a losing battle. They could neither find sufficient funding for the equipment, nor adequate time for the training to use it.

And yet, today, this approach persists with the result that schools sink money into what has become a parallel (and rapidly outdated) system of access - in the form of computer labs, clunky peripherals, and endless software upgrades. This approach has never worked well, except possibly for the richest schools, but to add insult to injury, students now prefer their personal, sleeker and more functional portable technologies anyway.

%70 of students carry a cell-phone, and most of these have video, photo, internet and (arguably limited) word-processing capabilities. In 2005, a study on ergoweb pointed-out that cell phones "have a big advantage over lap top computers in the classroom because they are cheaper, more portable and almost as sophisticated. Using camera phones, students develop their literacy by capturing images, writing about them, and emailing the work to friends, families and teachers."

Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young has done extensive research on the topic of mobile computing - as it has evolved with cell phones. She has made a few examples available on a PDF called Mobile Phones for Learning.

Powerful and inspiring technologies are walking into class in students' pockets, and yet we still discuss integration as thought the first step were to plug it into students' desks and hire someone to teach the teacher how to use it. At the same time (and the same schools) there is a great deal of chatter about how to prize portable technology out of students' hands so that they can 'focus on learning'. Perhaps we have this backwards. The Ergoweb study reports, "The principal of one participating school had been looking for something to excite disengaged students, and has been "overwhelmed by the resulting enthusiasm" when projects incorporated cell phones."

When schools began investing in technology, we could not have dreamed of a world where classrooms didn't need desktop computers; where students carried powerful mobile devices, with a wireless connection to some super-cool thing call the internet - in their pockets. As if that weren't fantastic enough, the news gets better: enter, wireless cloud computing, a wonderful thing for schools (and organizations large and small). No more need of expensive servers, upgrades or technical support people to run it all (and make us feel foolishly ignorant). Almost anything we need -storage, software, networking - its all online, and much of it Open Source.

We have arrived at an emancipating new age for learning. When we embrace it, not only will students learn better, be happier and more engaged, but schools will even save money.