How Edutech gave me a new perspective

This year, I was fortunate to attend the Eduetch conference. It was my first year attending the event which is the southern hemispheres largest education technology congress. 

I expected to walk away from Edutech feeling inspired and perhaps with an even deeper love of technology, but what I did walk away with was a surprising new perspective......

I have recently rediscovered Twitter and as well as starting to connect with some of the most inspiring people in education via the social network, I am also almost keeping a journal of my experiences and thoughts. I keep my Twitter account for professional interactions and so as you can imagine, I was burning a hole in my keyboard at Edutech this year. I managed well over 100 tweets in my two days. Over the coming days and week, I plan to go back and revisit the things that stood out to me, but for the purposes of this blog post, I like to share the following:

So that's it!

I expected to be all like "Yay! Woo! Tech-nol-o-gy! Yeah! - More, I must have more!"

BUT instead I realised that it is not about the technology at all. It is about the underlying intention. One of our keynote speakers, the famous Erin Sheninger said something along the lines of that the role of technology is to support  and enhance learning - it is not the learning! The pedagogical intent should come first - it is the driver, while technology is merely the accelerator. We should be focusing on what the core of our business is - TEACHING and LEARNING. Technology helps to leverage this, but it is not the be all and end all of what education is about.

This doesn't mean that I am no longer crazy about technology in the classroom - far from it. But it did make me think more about how I am using technology and hopefully this post will make you think more about it also.

Thanks for reading!