Inventing the Future for Our Students

As superintendent of a one school K-8 school district, I have the advantage of seeing the entire continuum of our students’ experience all in one place.  We recently began registration for our kindergarten students that we will welcome in August 2014.  We are responsible for creating their educational experience that will help them be successful for not only the next nine years (K-8) but for the eight years (high school and college) or so of school that will follow that in addition to their life beyond that.  We need to project what will their experience and their life be like 9 or 13 or 17 years from now and begin to prepare them for that.  This is both exciting and scary at the same time.  

At the same time, we are getting ready to send our 8th grade students off to high school.  As we prepare to say goodbye to our 8th graders and welcome our new kindergarten students, I have been reflecting back to August 2005.  That is when our current 8th graders started kindergarten. I did some digging to remind myself of how things were in 2005.  

• Did you know that four months before our 8th graders started kindergarten YouTube was launched?  Did any of us predict at that point that by the time they graduated more than 1 billion unique users would visit YouTube…EACH MONTH!  Who would have thought that the YouTube channel for the band One Direction would have over 12.6 million subscribers?
• iTunes was only selling music when they started kindergarten and made up a little over 4% of the music industry market.  A quote from a November 21, 2005 article indicated "Apple Computer's iTunes music store now sells more music than Tower Records or Borders, according to analyst firm the NPD Group.”  iTunes recently sold its 25 billionth song and has sold more than 1 billion TV episodes and 380 million movies. iTunes users are spending $1.75 billion a year on videos alone and iTunes accounts for $6.9 billion a year spent on digital music. In addition, the App store has hit over 50 billion downloads and Apple has paid out over $10 billion to developers.  
• Facebook only had 5.5 million users.  Today 1.184 billion people are on Facebook.
• Twitter was created in the spring of their kindergarten year.
• Just before they started 2nd grade, the first iPhone was released.  Now many of them have the 4th or 5th generation iphone.
• In fourth grade soon after they returned from winter break, the first iPad was released.  

The bottom line is that when today’s 8th grade students started kindergarten, none of us would have predicted things as they are today.  As I mentioned at the beginning, in August 2014, a new group of students will start kindergarten at Park View.  It is our job as educators to prepare them for success in the future.  We don’t know what that future will look like but it is safe to say that it will be continually changing.  New tools and new opportunities are created every day.  What it means for us as educators is that we need to continue to learn and grow and adapt to provide the best educational experience we can for our children.  Years ago a colleague of mine gave me a pen for my desk with a quote by Alan Kay that says, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  We need to continuously work on improving what we do and inventing and reinventing the future for the sake of all of our children.