It is time to use my learning and experience to further improve my life and others within education. I have been working in education since 2020, and I recognize education is a lifelong process. Lifelong learning has been a vital skill in my career even before I worked in education. Regardless of our personal opinions about technology, it is here to stay and change constantly. One of my favorite educational theorists Joe E. Kincheloe speaks about the need for teaching how to adapt because of the constant change in technology.

“And, I would maintain, in the contemporary globalized, electronic, information-saturated world of the twenty-first century, change is the status quo. Thus, a key dimension of a critical and rigorous education for such a hyper-reality involves the ability to interpret and make meaning of a barrage of information thrown at us by corporate-owned media and education.”

What Kincheloe expresses in the above quote is the vital skill required in all students entering today’s job market, adaptability. As someone who grew up in the early days of the internet, we have changed from phone calls and email as the only way to communicate. In K-12 education, there are specific programs or apps for teacher, parent, and admin communication, and any job I have had outside of K-12 uses some web 2.0 program for communication. Working in higher education administration, I answer a lot of student phone calls that could be simplified if the student emailed their professor and/or advisor, or they made a simple online search of the schools website, versus making a phone call. Making a phone call to find out information is no longer the best way to find information in a business setting.

In my experience, students do not know how to navigate educational platforms and systems unless they learned how to teach themselves technical skills. I had to learn basic coding skills to use the internet in the early 2000s. Remember needing HTML to customize your MySpace page?! Today is different, almost all the information we need to understand the world around us is online, but you have to know how to cut through the cacophony of internet noise to comprehend how to find the right information, not just any information.

Kincheloe, J. L. (2011). What Are We Doing Here? Building A Framework for Teaching. In E. B. Hilty (Ed.), Thinking about schools: A foundations education reader (pp. 227–248). Westview Press.