Steve Kinney

This is not my most popular line when I've talked to young folks," he admitted. "But I think the idea of schools being open five days a week, six hours a day, nine months of the year just doesn't work for families in our country anymore.

I've read the studies that show the correlation between extended school hours and higher performance. There's a concise summary in Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, if you haven't. That being said, given the huge public cost of extended the school day—or week, for that matter—I think we need to sit down and figure out how to use the existing schedule better.

If we extend the school day to buy us more time to employ the same antiquated teaching methods that we know don't work, are we really doing our students any good? Or, are we better off redefining what we do during the six hours we already have?

I have been working with teachers to learn to integrate technology into their teaching for almost ten years. Here are a few of the things I have learned - in no particular order (number 10 is probably the most important).

For me, it’s not so much about whether you’ve got a room full of iMacs or a lonely Pentium 3, it’s about thinking creatively about what you do with your class instead of teaching out of a book. A lot of times, teachers get hung up on the fact that they have iMovie ‘06 installed instead of iMovie ‘09 and its totally different than “I should be doing totally cool multimedia stuff with my kids.”