Leadership of Distractive Technology

As I sit here planning to write about distracted technologies we are preparing for our school fete and open day. The air around me is filled with music coming from our junior school orchestra in warm up. I walk over and see they are currently without a conductor leading them. They are all independent musicians working to improve their skill on their instruments but without direction. They individually may sound great but together the sound is mixed, blurred and and feels as though they are competing for air play.

Then, almost as if he was a magician our conductor walks into the room and the orchestra is transformed. The violin's begin to play in time with each other in harmony with the other string instruments. As the flutes perform they don't overpower the other wind instruments. It was beautiful, there was flow, direction and purpose.

I see distractive technologies are similar to our instruments. Without direction from a conductor the sounds they create are less than their potential, in a similar way a classroom using technology without the foresight of its teacher achieve less that what they could.

As teachers identify the overall direction of their lessons they develop the pedagogy to support the implementation and use of these technologies.

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