Technology Recycling for Excellence in Education
Where are we headed?
I spent a very enjoyable couple of days working alongside a retired technology coordinator for a school system, who had been contracted to help provide tech support for our workshop. A silver-haired, soft-spoken, gracious Southern lady who could have been anyone's favorite grandma, but who had a real love for all things tech and who had a knack for making nervous teachers feel at ease with computers. Not your stereotypical technology geek for sure. During breaks we did the usual commiserating about technophobic educators and how overzealous content filters will be the death of the Internet, etc, etc.
In one of our last conversations before heading home, we spent some time discussing where we thought things might be headed with education and technology. Although she had a solid applications background, almost all of it was with traditional software. She was fascinated as I showed her some of the things that could be done with Linux.
She used OpenOffice.org and Firefox, but beyond that she really had no experience with the wealth of free software available.
She was even more impressed when I demonstrated Google Documents. Although she had had a Google account for some time, she had never seen all of the resources on the site. (But then again, who has time to keep up with all Google is doing?) She got excited as I shared my vision of how apps like Google Docs could open up the world of technology for low-income students and families by allowing them to access the web in a library or community center, type a report or create a presentation, save it online, and then access and print or display it at school. All without spending a dollar of their limited resources on hardware or software. By the time we said goodbye, she was an open-source and web application convert.
So why does this have to be a vision for the future? Why not a vision for now? As we talked, she and I came to the same conclusion. The next breakthrough in educational technology isn't waiting to be discovered or invented. It's not a new program, or a website, or a piece of hardware. The next breakthrough is a change in the way people think.
In one of our last conversations before heading home, we spent some time discussing where we thought things might be headed with education and technology. Although she had a solid applications background, almost all of it was with traditional software. She was fascinated as I showed her some of the things that could be done with Linux.
She used OpenOffice.org and Firefox, but beyond that she really had no experience with the wealth of free software available.
She was even more impressed when I demonstrated Google Documents. Although she had had a Google account for some time, she had never seen all of the resources on the site. (But then again, who has time to keep up with all Google is doing?) She got excited as I shared my vision of how apps like Google Docs could open up the world of technology for low-income students and families by allowing them to access the web in a library or community center, type a report or create a presentation, save it online, and then access and print or display it at school. All without spending a dollar of their limited resources on hardware or software. By the time we said goodbye, she was an open-source and web application convert.
So why does this have to be a vision for the future? Why not a vision for now? As we talked, she and I came to the same conclusion. The next breakthrough in educational technology isn't waiting to be discovered or invented. It's not a new program, or a website, or a piece of hardware. The next breakthrough is a change in the way people think.
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