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Excerpt from ISTE 2015 Thought

Tuesday started off with an SIIA and CoSN breakfast where educators and administrators described their good and bad experiences with vendors. As in the past, districts are looking for solutions that help them solve big problems, they don’t want products, they want partners who do their homework in advance, listen to their priorities, and help them plan implementation and support for whatever initiatives they are about to undertake.

Tuesday’s highlight was listening to students describe their tech experience in school at the PR with Panache suite. Some of the quotable statements:

• Why would you have a 60 year old teacher who doesn’t even know how to reset a router be the gatekeeper for us using technology?
• If you’re trying to teach me something I already learned two years ago, don’t complain when you see I’m bored and not paying attention.
• Don’t talk about how you have computers in every classroom, when they are so slow we can’t actually do any work on them.
• I don’t care that the vendors are tracking me, even without tracking I can go on the Internet and find out where you live and what you are interested in in 2 seconds.
• We’ve learned to be careful about what we put on the Internet. We know there are bad people out there, and that there are things we shouldn’t post. Now you need to trust us and let us get our work done.
• Technology will never replace teachers. We need teachers. Without teachers, growing up would be like Lord of the Flies.