School 2.0

School 2.0

My first thought about School 2.0 is, what is the free version? You cannot do too much planning for technology transitions but you can spend too much time and money. We may have a Catch-22 where we need the product to do the planning to justify the cost and we need to justify the cost to buy the product. Tim Magner, the director in the office of educational technology in the Department of Education at a T & L conference in 2006 promotes School 2.0 as “a way for all the people involved with school to talk to each other about how they fit together and what schools should be.”

I am intrigued by Magner’s take on the way we need to look for a new model to fund education. He explains that we have funded specific programs but for success in the 21^st century, we need to look across programs, schools and districts to meet educational goals. His analogy is the 19^th and 20^th century location dependent factory model versus the 21^st century global interconnectedness where anyone can publish from anywhere. I agree we need to nurture the innovator in our students to remain competitive in the new world. Tom Friedman elaborated in more detail about the need to be an innovator in his book “The World is Flat.” This is a required read for all who wish to call themselves educators.