What are we really doing inside the classroom? Are we regurgitating facts or are we teaching students to face the unknown challenges of their lives? Are we boring them to tears or engaging them in conversation and research? How many empty seats are there at 8:00?  Isn’t it time to give some serious thought to what and how we teach?

A vision of students today should make you think about your work and its affect.

I believe its time for a radical change in how we work before the ivory towers disappear. Its time to reach students with rich content where they live and work. Why does learning have to occur inside a specific space? Why must it happen only on arbitrarily determined day? In limited time blocks? For a specific range of time?

The personal computer was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1982. There were only about 100,000 of them in use then. There were over 168 million PCs in the United States at the end of the last millennium. To what use are we putting this intellectual tool?

How many of your students own an MP3 player? What is the potential of this tool to teach?

The World Wide Web is a vast information jungle rich with information and knowledge waiting to be gleaned. Do your students know how to effectively use it? Do you?

Technology is advancing at an incredible rate but teaching practice remains much the same as it was hundreds of years ago. Why? Society looks to us to lead the way. We are expected to introduce the future to the populace. Instead we are being dragged kicking into the 20th century. Yes, I meant 20th.

Yes, much of what we do works so let’s not discard it. Rather let’s make it better by making it available in new ways. Let’s think about how technology can help us improve learning. Let’s once again practice thinking outside of the box. That’s what I’m doing. Please join me!