The opinions in this post, as are all the entries to this blog, are mine alone, and while others may share them (and I hope you do) I post on behalf of my own thoughts and ideas.

But I’m a little fired up. My main objective in my job is to help teachers integrate technology, and good ed-tech practice, into their teaching. And teachers do call on me all the time to help, suggest, fix, create with them.

So why am I fired up today?  Because I keep seeing this, and things like it:

So, one of the complaints I hear most often is that there is not enough technology in schools “How do you expect us to use technology if we don’t have enough?”  Which is a fair and legitimate complaint.  But as I sit pondering solutions and see something like the above, or that wretched “Look up” video that made the rounds a couple of years ago, I am exasperated.

One of the things I say about helping teachers is that I feel I must meet them where they are, and further, it is pedagogy that must drive technology, not the other way around. And so I feel I must also (gently) suggest that my teachers meet their kids where they are.  If they are distracted by the super-computer in their pocket, maybe they need to be encouraged to put it to good use, not put it in a plastic pocket. As I heard @gcouros  say at a conference recently–(and this is a big old paraphrase) “Are they distracted from authentic life by their devices, or are they more fully engaged because they are documenting so much of it?”