Digital fluency begins with tech-savvy teachers

Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) CEO Keith Krueger shares with EdTech: Focus on K-12 that a new three-part series from the organization called “Driving K-12 Innovation” is aimed at keeping administrators and educators abreast of the latest trends and best practices in deploying digital tools and resources in schools.For these publications, CoSN looked at the biggest challenges educators have regarding classroom innovation in 2019, which include digital equity and the connection between tech and the future of work, as well as emerging technologies and how these tools will impact students when they graduate.The first part of the series will be available in the spring of 2019, with the second part following in summer and the third, a toolkit administrators can use to help bring these ideas to their schools, coming at a later date. Tablets and laptops are staples in today's schools, but districts are starting to see the influx of a broad range of digital tools into classrooms, from virtual reality headsets to robotics building kits, which often tap coding language development.These items may sound like wonderful tools and activities for schools to pursue. But if educators don’t know how to put these devices into practice or are uncomfortable weaving them into existing curriculum, they become fancy — and sometimes expensive — objects that never make it into a student’s hands.