Yesterday I opened my Gmail and a box popped up, I didn’t read what it said, as usual, and pushed ok and next thing I know, the internets changed me Gmail. Immediately, OMG just fell out of my lips and for the rest of the day (and still this morning) I feel like that feeling when you cut like 6 inches off your hair and you keep wanting to put it in a ponytail.

Yesterday I was sitting in a PD on IWBs and the conversation came up about preparing our kids for college and lectures. (I have a post sitting in drafts right now on what I learned last week about colleges changing learning spaces, good stuff, stay tuned.)  The convo turned into the fact that even though technology today will be totally different by the time our students get into college or “the real world” (not that they don’t already live there) they will need to know how to adapt to this changing technology. Something as simple as the Gmail change can really through you for a loop, but I decided not to change it back to the old Gmail, it is time to move forward and stop looking back. Every time something changes, we usually look back later and realize it is for the better, we just need that adjustment period (think the new Facebook!). Our goal as educators, whether you believe in the term “digital native” or not, is to produce learners that have smaller adjustment periods when it comes to technology or even solving problems.

On the signature of my email I have this quote:

“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”—-Alvin Toffler

We need “unlearners” and “relearners” and saturating their lives with different types of technology and pushing problem solving (not the math kind) will move this forward.