By Analee Campbell

Children are the future, as they say, and so is technology. So why isn’t technology education a more prominent subject in today’s classroom? Startup entrepreneurs and members of the education system discussed the evolution of education through technology at the Internet Week HQ.

Technology challenges the current curriculum with the introduction of coding and digital skills development, to the movement of online courses and resources so that they may be accessed by all. However, there is still a large disconnect between technology and the classroom. Dianne Levitt, Director of K-12 Education at Cornell Tech jump started the conversation by revealing what she felt is the biggest problem:

“We are doing virtually nothing systematically to create technologists, to make sure that our children are technologically literate not in the use of the tool but what goes into creating the tool. We teach kids to write even though they won’t all become writers. We need to have the same literacy value for technology and all the
things that go into that.”

Jessica Brondo, Founder andCEO of Admittedly, quickly agreed with Levitt and added her own experience as a founder for her own company that produces products for students preparing for higher education.

“Oftentimes the people who are users of the technology are not necessarily the customers. There’s a huge disconnect in a lot of places where the company that is building a product is building it and is collaborating with the ultimate customer who is buying it but is forgetting to collaborate with the actual end user — education is a place where we see this more often than not.”

Darrell Silver, Co-Founder and CEO at Thinkful, also mentioned a lack of access to expertise within the classroom as a challenge. He said it’s difficult to learn something without having a guide/expert to help.

Leigh Ann Sudo-DeLyser, Consultant for Computer Science Education at the New York City Department of Education revealed why she believes technology education has not advanced. She said what is being taught is irrelevant.

One of the biggest challenges we face is actually a meta-step above. Both our technological infrastructure and the curriculum we are presenting in schools under the name of ‘technology education’ is 30 years old. We’re thinking about schools in the ways that companies thought about technology 30 years ago. We’re thinking about what workforce skills we’re preparing our students to do. We need to upgrade our infrastructure and tools that we provide our students as they navigate their educational careers, the tools we provide our teachers as they deliver quality instructions and then finally the skills that the students are acquiring are part of this educational process to prepare for them for not just for the 21st century jobs but for the jobs that are not even existing yet in this early party of the 21st century.

Levitt followed Sudol-DeLyser’s statement with an emphasis on the preparation of the teachers who are in charge of education students with not only the curriculum, but also including technology preparation as well.

We are also not consciously preparing teachers at the beginning of their careers and through their careers to communicate this stuff to kids. We haven’t figured out how to tuck it into the curriculum and we haven’t really made a conscious effort to do so. We got teachers in the classroom already in a pretty disruptive universe where we are trying to throw stuff at them that really they are not prepared to deliver. It’s not that we don’t know that kids needs this or that teachers need the capacity built to do it. But we are really doing, especially in teacher preparation, virtually nothing.

To learn more on how technology will revolutionize education, watch the full session below: