It's all about the context, not the tool

While at ISTE last week, I heard this quite a few times - ‘they use Microsoft Office in business, so that’s what we should be using in schools’.

On the airplane home, multiple people around me are working on their laptops, and most working in PowerPoint. After a few minutes of watching them, and thinking about what I heard at ISTE, here is my two cents....

I prefer Google products - which is obvious based on my Google certifications. But if tomorrow we switched to Office 365, would I be unable to do my job? Would I still be able to support teachers and demonstrate how to use technology in the classroom?

The answer is yes. It doesn’t matter which is used - Microsoft Office or GSuite Apps - the skills are interchangeable. If we switched, I would still use Slides/PowerPoint to create my weekly Tech Tips newsletter. Students can still create fake Instagram posts or BookSnaps in Powerpoint, just like they do in Slides.

Case in point - let’s say I teach a statistics class and my students utilized a bunch of functions in Sheets to show what they have learned. When they get older, and if they have to complete similar tasks, they will be able to do so in Excel. A lot of the formulas are the same, and there are even help websites to go between the two.

So use what you prefer. As long as your students are learning how to communicate, collaborate, create, and think critically - then that's all that matters. What they use to do so - that doesn't matter.







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