Technology-driven educational innovation

I was reading an article on James Goodnight (billionaire CEO of SAS) in "Forbes" magazine recently and was impressed with his vision about educational reform, starting in North Carolina, his own sphere of influence. Like the speaker from Adobe we heard at last year's IES retreat, Goodnight was amazed at how little his own children's school was utilizing technology to reach kids. He rightly suggested that it was no wonder kids weren't much interested in school; they live in a world of iPods, blogs and other user-driven means of accessing information, but they are expected to come to a classroom and watch somebody write on a whiteboard. His position is that, unless we do something, all the best jobs in the U.S. will be taken by foreign-trained individuals and that those going through the American educational system will be relegated to jobs in the service industry. So what he did was to start a new secondary prep school outside Raleigh. This page tells a little about what's happening in that school: http://www.sasinstitute.fi/news/sascom/2004q1/feature_sasinschool.html

Previously an avowed Luddite, I have come to believe that we will never reach our students unless we use their means of communication. I can't imagine that getting up to speed on educational technology would be any harder for you guys than it is for me; I see from your blogs that many of you are already ahead of the curve. I hope that we'll have an interactive grammar program to pilot this summer and I think it will go a long way in helping us engage our students. I'm so jazzed about having Moe here to expand our horizons and hope we'll keep this conversation going.