There have been a lot of new developments in my life recently. I started a new job working with an online and mobile test prep company known as TestSoup that makes flashcards for a variety of different standardized tests. I am learning about marketing, social media, and (of course) education.
But perhaps the most significant change in my life recently (within the past year and a half) is that now I am a parent, and am viewing the world through a very different set of eyes. It affects everything, but mainly it forces you to look at everything in the long term. When you go through something, you wonder how it will be for your child when he or she goes through it.
This is exactly what happened at the end of last month, when TestSoup attended its first conference: ISTE 2011. Not only was it TestSoup’s first conference, it was mine as well. It was an interesting experience, I must confess. Lots of walking, lots of talking, and lots of hand-shaking. There were other things too, but those are the three that stood out the most.
As I wandered around the conference, gawking at the amazing educational technology (EdTech) tools available these days, I couldn’t help but imagine what it will be like when my child goes through school. What will schools be doing five or ten years in the future? What are they doing now?
As it turned out, there was an entire section of the conference devoted to answering that question, and it was in that section that I spent most of my time. I wanted to learn all I could about what these schools were doing. Of course, I wanted to tell them how TestSoup could help them by offering their schools free access to our online test prep materials. But in talking to people about what I could offer them, I ended up learning boatloads about what they were already doing for their students.
Some of these projects sounded absolutely out of this world. Building a 3D replica of a botanical garden that you navigate on a computer? Awesome. Constructing and programming robots over the internet with students from Korea? Amazing. Helping Elementary School students run their own online newspaper? Incredible.
These were the types of assignments that I hope my child will complete when he is in college. Heck, these are the types of projects I would be happy to do now. The face of education is changing, and we owe it almost entirely to technological advancement; to EdTech.
If you are a parent of a college-boud teen or current college student, I strongly encourage you to get involved and see what kind of EdTech can be adopted by their school. There’s some very, very exciting stuff happening.
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This guest post was contributed by John J. Walters, Director of Marketing for TestSoup, the premier provider of online and mobile test prep solutions.