Finding a way to go beyond the wires and boxes and use technology to better equip today's students for life in an increasingly digital economy was the goal last week as a record number of educators and school technology leaders converged on Washington, D.C., for the Consortium for School Networking's (CoSN's) 10th Annual Networking Conference, March 22-23.

More than 800 district superintendents, school technology chiefs, and other education decision makers attended the two-day event, which set out to make good on the promise of technology in the nation's public schools.

Bob Moore, CoSN's immediate past chair and the executive director of IT services at Blue Valley USD #229 in Overland, Kans. , outlined the mission: to use technology "creatively and fully" to improve education. Attendees used the meeting to nudge the national conversation away from access and toward how technology can be used to help schools meet the evolving demands of the 21st century--from improving accountability and student achievement in line with the No Child Left Behind Act to training more highly qualified teachers and preparing students for success in tomorrow's technology-driven workforce.

Rather than simply apply technology as a tool to change how they teach, MIT professor emeritus and longtime technology advocate Seymour Papert, beseeched educators during a provocative--and at times, animated--keynote address to seriously reconsider what's being taught in the nation's classrooms.

To adequately prepare today's students for their future, Papert said, educators must promote technology as a solution with real-world implications--not just some new tool used to drive home rote concepts.

"We need to give up this assembly line model of education," Papert said. The visionary professor chided the nation's public school system for focusing too much on standards and benchmarks and not enough on innovation.

Papert's concerns were echoed by another longtime champion of educational technology, Chris Dede. A professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, Dede is known internationally for his work with virtual reality technology and its applications for learning.

Dede questioned whether a national preoccupation with tests and standards ushered in by NCLB has kept schools from actively pursuing the kinds of innovative, technology-driven curricula essential to prepare kids for life in the new knowledge-based economy. Citing a burgeoning demand for tech-savvy workers, he challenged schools to equip future graduates with the skills necessary to land better jobs.

Media is reshaping the way people--and especially, kids--live their lives, Dede said. With the advent of eMail--and more recently, instant messaging and file sharing--among other innovations, kids reside in a world where access to technology has become second-nature.

But while tech-savvy students have come to rely on such innovations, Dede explained, schools have been slow to adapt their pedagogies to reflect this demand. As a result, he said, students today are more interested in the work they do outside of school, than in what goes on inside the four walls of the classroom.