Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I meet with a bunch of other ed tech folks from the Twin Cities area once a month to share ideas and see demonstrations of various learning technologies. As I type this I’m sitting in a meeting with a representative from the Minnesota Dept. of Education who is giving all of us an update on state-wide ed tech issues.

During a discussion about technology standards for students, one of the participants pointed out that significant gaps still exist between the technology skills that most kids bring to school and the kind of technologies we expect them to use in their schoolwork. I was struck by the thought:

What if the technologies that already interest our kids are the ones that matter most?

Now I’m not going to suggest that the kids in my school district have things all figured out. But maybe, in the long run, WordPress and IM matter more than Word, iTunes is more important than PowerPoint, and Firefox and Wikipedia are more valuable than the World Book Encyclopedia.

This is almost certainly overstated, but the key point, I think, is that what we old fogies think kids need to know may not necessarily be what matters for them in 10 years.

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