Prompt #7

"Discuss which technologies you believe, in accordance with the Gretzky Principle, we should be skating toward in American K-12 classrooms, and explain why."

NHL professional hockey player Wayne Gretzky explains "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." To educators, this essentially means that they should focus on the direction education is going instead of where it currently is. More so, educators should focus on what is up-and-coming in relation to technology in the classroom so that they can focus on better preparing students for their future life beyond the classroom. I believe that educators should be "skating" toward cloud computing and collaborative environments in American classrooms above all other technologies.

Cloud computing opens up a world of possibilities and opportunities for anyone with access to the internet. Students can work on group projects simultaneously from the comfort of each of their homes to accomplish tasks without meeting in person using collaborative environments. Groups can work together at different times of day using this technology and more effectively accomplish tasks. Students may work together on assignments online while in different classrooms, parts of the school, in their homes, in different states, and even while in different countries. Students may gain a better view of the world and all it has to offer by participating in collaborative environments.

In my own college educational past, group members and I have used cloud computing in addition to collaborative environments through Google Documents to create presentations, create and edit papers, and work on related assignments for multiple classes. This demonstrated to be extremely helpful since my peers and I were taking classes throughout the day and had different schedules. Each member of the group could work on their assigned part by a certain deadline that we set so that we could more efficiently work toward our common goal. These two types of technologies prove to be extremely beneficial in my own educational career and I am sure that they will be increasingly helpful as they are repeatedly used in classrooms across the United States.