I believe that one of main responsibilities as a teacher is to prepare my students for problems and situations that do not exist today.  The growth of technology in the past few decades has spawned entirely new sectors of law, medicine, business, and public-service. More importantly, it implies profound social changes in the way that people and communities interact, learn, collaborate, and create.

Children must be prepared for this rapidly changing world in two primary ways. First, we must ensure that future generations develop a critical consciousness as well as an ability to engage with higher-level thinking processes. Our children must learn to think creatively and fearlessly if they hope to identify solutions to unforeseen problems. Second, we must provide our children with a technological literacy. This literacy provides our children with the practical skills and knowledge necessary to cope with a changing reality, but will also play a fundamental role in shifting the way that the future generation thinks about the act of problem-solving itself.

Technology is expanding at an exponential rate. It is imperative that we actively work to keep abreast of this expansion, lest it surpass us. This means that our education system must acknowledge the imperative nature of our task.  As a future leader in the field, I must be prepared to initiate, foster, and defend implementation.  On a national level, we must be prepared to increase funding for technology.  Until then, I will work to secure funding for my classroom, school, and district, through grant opportunities and business partnerships.

On a community level, our districts must also establish opportunities for teacher training.  A technologically-tentative teaching force can not implement new technologies in meaningful ways.  I will assist this process by offering myself as a resource, leading small workshops, and facilitating cross-sessions where others have an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and brainstorm possible educational applications.

Finally, at a classroom level, our teachers must be willing to create communities of learners who work together to build a rich library of knowledge.  All students must be willing and comfortable sharing knowledge, experiences, and ideas.  This requires a radical shift in the way we think about the process of education.  However, if there is one thing the Internet (and history) has demonstrated, it is that we accomplish much more by standing on the shoulders of our peers as opposed to one or two “experts.”

Adherence to such a plan can foster a new community, a society that is able to take risks, secure in the knowledge that a team of intelligent minds is on hand should things go awry.  This not only increases our own technological prowess, it sets an important example for future generations.  Teamwork, risk-taking, active learning, and lateral thinking are skills that ensure the success of the future generation.

I have been fortunate enough to build a network of amazing peers, inspirations, and friends while obtaining my Master’s in Educational Technology.  I have learned that the answer to any question does not lie buried in a dense and dusty text, but rather in the living conversations that are all around us.  Learning to tap into these insights is the skill that is fundamentally responsible for a dramatic shift in my own thinking about the world.  I plan to pass this skill onto my own classrooms, by having them create and sustain their own communities.  I plan to broaden these communities by collaborating with the classrooms of my peers.  This upcoming year, I plan to collaborate with a classroom in Jakarta.  This process teaches my students the content, but more importantly, it demonstrates that communities are not limited by language, political classifications, social status, or geographic coordinates, and that if use technology to work together, amazing things can happen.

Of all the things I have learned while obtaining my Master’s in Educational Technology, it is the knowledge that is shared from the creation of virtual communities that I find most radical, most hopeful, and most vital to our future.