EightBlack.

I was thrown to the wolves yesterday.

Penny Goh, a refreshing new age teacher at my son’s school asked me to talk to her Year 11 Business Management class about “business”.

I tentatively accepted but thought “how hard could it be right?”

Wrong.

For one, these kids have the attention span of a nat.

There were 21 of them - 6 girls, 15 boys. All around 15-16 years old.

I asked for a room that had a pc projector and internet access.

Now most modern schools are “wired” and all of the older kids use the same laptops. Makes sense. Wireless is everywhere.
I thought the kids would be interested in my take on the internet and Google and just how you can make money using the internet.
Instead we were talking about old world business plans and how they were going to make money from a sausage sizzle.

More perturbing to me was the kids lack of interest in things online.

Blogging is foreign to them - despite my pleading with them to have all set up their own blog by the time they leave school.

I did confirm one thing though.

Mobile content is the future. Not one kid in the class was without a mobile phone. SMS or text was their life.

And portals like Google and Yahoo need to work out quickly how to tap these kids social DNA.

Sure they used email. Mostly hotmail. Makes sense. Very few Yahoo email addresses. Not one gmail.

Interesting.

Maybe it was because we kept having technical issues that the kids lost interest - note to myself (next time, print the presentation on real paper).

Maybe it was that the kids were just 15.

Maybe I’ve just lost touch or completely misread them.

I dont know.

But I know this - I wouldn’t teach if you paid me in Google shares. Nope. Couldn’t do it.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 1:17 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.