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I finally had a chance to see Jeff Utecht at the ISACS conference recently. I’ve been a long-time reader of his blog but I still love to hear people present in person.

Really? It’s My Job To Teach Technology?

“We are not teaching technology, we are teaching skills that every student needs to have and technology happens to be a part of that. Create can be met with paper and pencil, with glue and scissors, with a hammer and nail, or with movie maker and it should be the job of every teacher to expose students to different ways of creating content that fits within their discipline.”

(Via The Thinking Stick.)

Absolutely. This has been the biggest shift in how we talk about technology at our school in the past 7 years. It is not “just a tool” and but rather a way of creating, analyzing, evaluating, applying, understanding. A way of thinking. Jeff’s whole post is worth reading, because I think it neatly sums up expectations for using technology.

We’ve chosen to use the NCTE’s 21st century literacies as our goals for our students. Previously, we had a mess of functions to master in specific software. If we are able to educate students to create, communicate, and collaborate using any software or technology (broadly defined) that is at their disposal, I think we’ll be doing well by those goals.