WHY: Principals of Technology

Nope, not a title typo.  Several posts and a video (above) came across my PLN last week on how different K-12 principals are reacting to the presence of everyday digital things in the classroom (things folks use outside school like cell phones, ipods and Facebook; not smartboards, projectors and locker checks).  Some are alarmed by the potential of these things to adversely affect the "real work" of school.  Others are engaging with how best to incorporate these things.  There's also a Boston Globe article on yet another high school principal.

I'm pretty pro-technology in the classroom and among students, and a few lines from that piece in the Globe jumped out at me:

• "...leaving behind 'the idea that people can only be educated between 7 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.’'"
• "...Adopting technology is a necessity, Conti said, 'like heat, electricity, air-conditioning. I think of it as a utility, not anything new or special.’'" [reminds me of Carr in The Big Switch]
• “If they want to cheat, they’re going to cheat’’ [reminds me of Steve Jobs on music piracy as a behavior problem, not a technology one]
• "When students graduate, Larkin said, 'if they only know people in Burlington, we didn’t do our job.'" [on Skype]

My experience has been that the more School seems to diverge from students' perception of "the real world" the more relevance (= "attention points") School loses.

I do my best to make sure this doesn't happen to those learners I work with every day, and challenge other educators to do the same with a generation that we desperately need to be smart, thoughtful, and imaginative.  I would ask teachers to ask themselves if they are contributing to the cognitive dissonance through their lesson plans and attitudes, or are they helping students do the great bridging work of synthesis and meaning-making?

~mrc