Tech yourself before you wreck yourself

Today was the first day of the Education Summit in Iowa. Most of the events were streamed live, and I'm hoping the Department of Education will also post the videos for anyone who missed them today. For now, I want to focus on the afternoon's opening remarks by Scott McLeod, professor at Iowa State University and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology in Leadership (CASTLE).

McLeod is an educator who understands the digital age, the 'Net Generation, and the possibilities and challenges our increasingly tech-based world presents to educators. In his remarks, he named a dozen things (including a catch-all "And so on...") educators would do "[i]f we were REALLY serious about educational technology." As a fairly regular ad hoc Wiki* contributor and editor, I particularly enjoyed item four: "we'd teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than 'just saying no' to Wikipedia." All of McLeod's suggestions focus on involving students (and ourselves) in learning and using technology to engage with the digital world in which our students already exist and for which they must be prepared by the time they graduate.

To McLeod's list I would add that we should involve students in developing the software and technology of the future. I know from personal experience that technology development is within reach for our students; I was eight or nine when I wrote my first DOS-based computer program on an IBM PC and saved it to a floppy disk before the end of class time. My school was a technology leader of its time, with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. Nearly two decades later, not much has changed in the schools where my teacher peers and I have taught and are teaching. Each is equipped with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. And cell phones and other hand-held digital devices are banned.

Even SMART Boards, truly revolutionary tools in the hands of tech-savvy educators, are often reduced to their lowest-tech function when time-pressured classroom teachers become stuck using the digital markers to jot down test-prep lessons, just as they would use dry-erase markers on a non-interactive whiteboard. It doesn't have to be this way. With tech knowledge, computers for students, and the freedom to teach, today's teachers can and should be pushing students to develop new computer programs -- call them apps, if you will -- along with written, oral, and digital presentations to "pitch" their initial ideas to peer-collaborators and, later, "market" their final products to classmates. If we teach them, these are skills our students can use today, as they prepare themselves for the future.