Context

- We're in a world where what we hope, is our kids can create lives for themselves that are really engaging. Where they do something they care about really deeply. Whatever that thing is. And so, how do we help kids get a start in realizing that they're gonna be creating a life for themselves? So is there a way that technology can support great teachers so that kids can start to pursue all of these different interests? There's a whole raft of technologies that are about supporting the administrative aspects of schools and these can truly save teachers and schools time and money.

Again, if you've got the right ones in the right environment with the right support systems. There's another set of technologies that are about supporting how teachers learn. Teachers are our bravest learners. Right? They got into teaching most of the time because they love to learn. Doesn't stop when they became a teacher. But sometimes the amount of time that they have for learning kind of goes away.

So there's an emerging set of tools that are around professional development. How do they learn to be great teachers? How do they get support from their colleagues? How do they find interesting ideas for either relating to their kids, managing their kids, presenting information? So there's a whole raft of technologies around professional development. There's a raft of technologies around communicating with parents. Once again, parents are a big part of the equation.

We need to try to help those parents figure out, "What's going on in the classroom? "How do I get a window into what's going on?" Lots of parents would be happy to remind their kids, "Hey, did you study for that test?", if they know the test is going on. Then there's a collection of technologies that are about curriculum. Digital curriculum. They're not just electronic textbooks but their different ways of presenting real content. For instance, we're seeing the emergence of some electronic texts where teachers have an opportunity to embed a commentary or a question or something kids should think about as they're reading the text.

Gives the teachers a way of seeing whether the kids are actually doing the work. It gives the kids some added ideas about, "Well, how should I think about this piece of text "or this thing that I'm reading?" There are opportunities for the kids to engage each other in those texts as well. Send each other a comment or a message or ask questions of their community. So there's a whole collection of tools around digital curriculum. But once again, that's only one part of the stack.

Finally, there's a collection of technologies that help administrators understand what's going on in their districts, because as the schools come into this electronic world school districts will want to make sure that their students are protected as well. Wanna make sure that their data is protected. Wanna make sure that there are policies in place that support the schools in the way they wanna work. And so there's a collection of technologies at a very high administrative level.

So there's a lot in that box of "technology" for school.