On one side of my family, I am surrounded by educators. My uncle retired last year after teaching for 30 years — well, semi-retired as he now works as a TOC. My aunt has worked in schools in various administrative/secretarial capacities for a long time. My grandmother, many moons ago, taught elementary school for a short period. My cousin became a teacher a couple of years ago. They all have a lot of insight into education, but none are particularly superb with technology.

My other cousin, though, is a software developer. Over the weekend, I was chatting with him about an app he’s developing and about how my start to school has been. I was discussing this tech in ed class with him and told him that we’re required to maintain this WordPress blog for the class.

He was not impressed.

He absolutely could not believe that we would either choose or be forced to use WordPress.

Why the hate?

Well, he says that WordPress is a bit dated at this point, that if people don’t know what they’re doing (which they often don’t) they add plugins to the point where they mess up their entire site, etc. Simply put, he thinks there are better blogging platforms than WordPress.

He’s probably right — WordPress is maybe not the most functional or user-friendly or anything else platform. And then I got to explain to him why we’re using WordPress, proving that I’ve been paying attention to what this course is about.

His focus is technology, mine is technology in education. From a pure tech standpoint, he certainly knows better than me. As one of the few non-educators in that part of the family, he is less familiar with the tech needs of education. As we’re learning, using technology in education isn’t about using the best tech, the newest tech, the fanciest tech…It’s about approaching and integrating technology in a way that suits the needs of education. I explained to him that we’re using this WordPress site because we need something simple that will meet the needs of the less technologically proficient among us while also satisfying our privacy and data control needs. These WordPress sites are hosted by an open education site hosted in British Columbia and provide ease of use with the option to personalize and add on for those more confident with the technology.

Is WordPress the best platform? No. Is it the best, or at the very least a pretty good, platform for meeting these needs regarding access and privacy? In other words, does it meet the goals of what we’re learning are the important points in integrating technology into our pedagogy? Yes.