Technology in education is a fad. It’ll pass.
I hear that a lot. And it’s true that technology in education is a fad. Everyone wants to get a piece of the tech-ed pie, from Google to Microsoft to a million other companies and tech startups. Technology in education is the topic du jour1, and not just within the educational community.
So if technology is a fad, why embrace it? Why not just wait for it to go away? Because it’s not going to.2
Some fads remain fads. They catch fire, they excite – or enrage, and sometimes both at once – the general populace, and then they’re gone, like a shooting star or Keyser Soze.
Some fads evolve beyond that and become ingrained into the everyday fabric of our lives, to the point where we no longer think about them in terms of being a “fad”, or even pause to think of them at all. It’s just there and it feels like it always was. Welcome to technology.
So if you are on the sidelines, thinking you’ll just sit this one out, tug on the coach’s shirt and let ‘em know you’re ready to get in the game3.
If you give it a try, you might like it4. And even if you don’t like it at first, you might someday grow to love it and find it to be indispensable, as many others have. If you have tried technology and it didn’t have the desired result, don’t give up! Not every technology integration method will work for you – keep trying different things until you find something that does what you need.
Thanks for reading. Join me next week as I discuss why marriage doesn’t work.
Be sure to check out this week’s infographic, too!
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1 Using French automatically makes this post classy!
2 Save this and quote me in ten years.
3 Sports analogies for the coaches and sports fans!
4 I tell my 4 year-old son this about vegetables, and it doesn’t work, but I still try. Teachers: technology is your vegetable – try it, you might like it!