Concepts Are More Important

I was reading an article about F/OSS in educational environments when I ran across this paragraph.

Myth: Students need to learn the standard applications.

Schools have a responsibility to give students the skills they need to succeed. By the time high school students get to the job market, today’s applications will be antiquated. Students need to know how to use word processors to communicate and spreadsheets to explore numbers and graphs. Their technical skills should transcend the particular idiosyncrasies of the applications.

This is something that I really preach to my students.  Consider this.  A first year college student starting an educational licensure program this fall will not be a classroom teacher until the fall of 2011.  In Ohio, all higher education institutes offer a technology integration class as a freshman or sophomore course.  In other words, the content from a tech course will be three or four years old by the time a student (or as we label them – teacher candidate) becomes a teacher. 

This is why concepts are so important.  In four years Vista and Office 2007 will be getting old.  Memorizing commands that are specific to these applications will not have a long term benefit to the teacher using a completely different set of software applications in 2012.

The final product is most important.  Why is a teacher using a word processing or spreadsheet program?  Once this is established, the teacher should always be able to work towards the goal with whatever software is available.  After general concepts are mastered, the shortcuts will come with daily use.