Picture of the jump to conclusions mat from the movie office space with insert picture of the movie character Tom Smykowski

How do we know what we know? How do we know what we should know? I’ve been in the field of educational technology for almost 20 years. Despite my hesitations, I think that makes me a relative expert in the field, and I always have a hard time gauging whether what I know is general knowledge or not.  However, lately, I’ve been getting the sneaking suspicion that those of us in the field are making too many assumptions about the general technology knowledge of teachers and other educational practitioners whose job does not constantly revolve around thinking about technology. I think we get so wrapped up in the possibilities that we see for technology in education that we jump to conclusions about the steps required to integrate whatever solution we’re talking about. We have the tendency to think that the teachers who will be responsible for the integration of technology understand it as well as we do. We may provide some kind of technical PD, where we tell them to click here and click there but, ultimately, I think we sometimes leave them more confused than they were before we started.

I think that we need to take a step back and re-evaluate the technological knowledge of the teachers we’re asking to implement the solution and provide professional development that is appropriate for the level of knowledge they have. We are never going to be successful if the ed tech people are being much more high level than the audience we’re trying to reach. We need to do what we always talk about doing with our students: we need to meet them where they are rather than force them to be where we are.

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