I can’t put my hands on the thing right now, but I’m pretty sure that the Parenting Manual I was issued when my kids were born deemphasized the importance of keeping up with changes in the way they do things as they grow up. The worksheets and hand-written essays of their younger years have changed into collaborative work done online as they “matured” into high-schoolers.

Has it changed the work? Maybe less than it first appears. Technology may change human behavior, but it doesn’t really change human nature. Most kids don’t much like doing homework, and cloud services haven’t done a lot to change that. What’s interesting is that the kids, teachers, and administrators I talked to generally like the flexibility of using cloud-based classroom tools, but none of them think it has fundamentally changed classroom life.

Why can’t we see your homework?

My two boys are sophomores at the Institute of Collaborative Education, a public New York City middle/high school with about 80 kids in each of the six grades. ICE puts most of its educational emphasis on project work; the kids have a fairly major project to complete for each class in each quarter, many of them collaborating with either a small group or with their class as a whole within a cloud environment.