The thing is, a lot of teachers are still pretty uncomfortable with technology. I recently worked with someone who referred to it like the enemy — in her view, it’s unreliable (so no lesson should depend upon it); it’s addictive (distracting students away from their work); it’s a crutch that teachers use to ‘entertain’ their students; and it’s a security/personal identity threat. Oh, and by the way, this teacher was born after 1980, so she would be labelled by some as a ‘digital native’.

I also sigh with you.

P.S. “Teaching the New Writing” — great book!!

My story doesn’t relate to them actually using the tehnology but making bad assumptions about what students know and how they use it. This made me sighed last year when my son in Year 9 had to answer the question by pretending they were writing a blog post (on paper off course) for their exam. Prior to the exam the Year 9 teachers did discuss it with all the students as the person who set the exam said we’ll get them to write in a style of a blog post because all kids of this age definitely know what a blog is and what it means to write in that style, Totally crazy! Exam being set by a teacher who didn’t understand what blogging is, getting students to write on paper as if it was a blog post, while students didn’t know what blogs are and had no idea what that meant.

Your son will be fine, I’m sure, though you’ll be doing the work of tech teachers. But for a lot of kids, they’ll continue to use technology for the games and social networking, missing out on the tools of creation and information-finding that really is necessary (and enjoyable). And they won’t get it from anywhere else.