David Warlick is asking some great questions about how we should teach "computer applications." In other words, how do we expect the kids to learn how to do all this stuff?

I actually think that this is one of the things that really sets SLA apart… I think we’ve come up with a really powerful way of working as a team of teachers to ensure that students learn the tech skills that will help them succeed as students. The students learn them in the context of their classwork, while being taught by a master technology teacher.

We stream English, History and Science so that the kids take those courses as a cohort. In 9th grade, we also include their elective rotation which includes a semester-long tech integration class. That’s taught by a tech teacher (Marcie) who works with the subject area teachers to look for places to integrate and teach the tech skills — many of which are application-based — through the content of the “academic” classes. This allows the teachers to use the tech without having to be experts themselves, it allows us to really teach the tech skills without worrying about the balance of content v. tech-skills, and it gives the kids the chance to really see how these tech skills are transformative.

But I’ll take it one step further. We have to be careful about teaching applications, because applications change. Let’s teach tech literacy, and teach kids to do graphic manipulation where Photoshop is a tool, not an end… we need to teach kids to use these tools, yes, but we need to make sure the kids understand that the specific tool is merely a means to an end, and merely one means to that end.

This also has the benefit of making sure that the kids don’t just get a hap-hazard grouping of skills, based on the teachers they have. The faculty can sit down and identify the skills we think the kids will need, and then Marcie is able to work with each teaching team of Science, English and History and figure out where and when to teach what. It can get messy, and there are some things that Marcie teaches outside of a specific "academic" project, but on the whole, we’re able to really show students how these tools — application, Web 2.0 and otherwise — really can change the way they think about school, schoolwork and themselves.