Wednesday, April 9, 2008

It's not about the hardware

Today I received a call from a company that works for Edline, our online portal for parents, students and teachers. The gist of the call was that they had a local station that wanted to come out and do a story on how we were using different ed-tech tools, especially Edline for the benefit of students.

I spoke with the principal, a couple of teachers and several students to give them a heads up about what was going to take place and we wanted them to talk about it on camera. On arrival, the reporter, a graduate of Incarnate Word High School in San Antonio, was asking me questions about some of our programs. We are currently in the 2nd year of an iPod initiative with our incoming freshmen as well as many other things to hopefully help encourage our students to become life long learners.

As we progressed through the discussion and the interview it seemed to focus more on the hardware than education. As I watched and listened to the questions and the direction of the interviews I began thinking how many people feel the same way? How many people feel that as long as we have a lot of equipment we are doing well? Or how many people feel that because we don't have certain equipment then we can't do what we need to so maybe we shouldn't try? I may be jumping too hard on the interview process as I have not seen the final product, bad storms in the area have taken much of the news time this evening.

After reading Miguel's entry on "What Is Your Stop Doing List" I think maybe looking at what we do in that manner may open some new mental doors.

So many wonderful reads out there and so few hours in the day.

No comments: