Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

The scores are in.  According to my classes, the most important person in educational technology is Bill Gates.  A distant second was Steve Jobs followed closely by Tim Berners-Lee.

When I asked if anyone knew where Bill Gates had taught, no one seemed to know.  He didn’t actually graduate from college, so he didn’t teach in K-12 or higher education.

He did co-found Microsoft and make a few billion dollars.  That has ended with one of the most philanthropic endeavors in history which has financially benefited many educational institutions.  That has to count for something.

There were many votes for people you would see as keynote speakers at eTech or NECC.  These people were harder find using Google.  I also saw a few people that listed teachers that had personally touched their lives.  That’s the great thing about educational technology.

If you could choose three people as the most prominent people in educational technology, who would you select?  This is the question I posed to one of my classes.  I gave no ground rules.  We have no text book with a chapter that discussions this.  It’s wide open.

Pick three and give the reasons for selecting each.

If you think about this question in a different context, it could be easy to answer.  Name the three most important people in the history of American government.  In technology, it would be easier to list the three most important people in the world of personal computers or in the development of the Internet.

Educational technology is more obscure.  The entry in Wikipedia wasn’t created until 2005, four years after most topics were entered.  There is no standard introductory text that is used in edtech.  In fact, most of the people I know in this field are self-taught.

It will be interesting to see the names that make the list.

David Warlick has a post concerning the way teachers are treated in regards to technology.  Many teachers are simply given a pass when it comes to learning new technologies.  We have all seen this happen. 

I remember the mid 1990’s when SchoolNet had the first big wave of money earmarked for desktop computers in elementary schools.  I heard a few teachers say, “I only have three years until retirement.  I’m not messing with this thing.”  Now it has been more than ten years, and we still have teachers that are apprehensive about trying things out.

The main point in David’s post is that teachers are special.  I cannot agree more.  I realized this when I first started to work in education almost twenty years ago.  I worked for a university helping teachers integrate technology, but I had never been a classroom teacher in a K-12 environment.  Because of that, many teachers felt I “just didn’t understand” where they were coming from. 

I left the university and became a classroom teacher.  After I added “high school teacher” to my resume, I was in.  It was as if a barrier had been torn down and now I could relate to teachers better.

Now I work with pre-service teachers to prepare them to use technology in the classroom.  One of the first things we cover in class is the NETS for Teachers standards from ISTE.  The first standard sums it all up.

Teachers demonstrate a sound understanding of technology operations and concepts.

That standard is broken down into two broad areas.

1 – Understand the technology as well as the students understand it
2 – Create a plan to continually learn new technologies used in education

That second one is why I have teachers blog.  Blogging gives teachers a way to discuss new technologies and document a plan showing continual educational technology growth.  Remember, there is no magic bullet when it comes to classroom technology.