Principle #1: Technology supports instruction. Not the other way around.

Comment: Let your students needs dictate your choice of software. Don’t let the software dictate how your students will be taught.

Principle #2: There are no right or wrong software programs or sets of programs.

Comment: There are no standards. Only you can decide which software is right for what you want to do. Praise be to those administrators who support and respect teachers' diverse use of technology! An artist will never have his or her tools of trade proscribed by a patron. (It wouldn’t be a manifesto unless it contained such a proclamation.) Down with 800-Pound Gorilla Software!

Principle #3: Technology encourages editing.

Comment: Technology may also dramatically change the process of revision into a less rigid sequence.

Principle #4: Technology encourages the writer to explore and incorporate other media in addition to printed text: pictures, sound, music, animation and video.

Principle #5: Technology workshops should prepare teachers not in the use of specific software, but should inculcate teachers in a wide range of strategies for learning operating systems, hardware and new software. Global understanding of process will lead to independent learning and exploration rather than the acquisition of large numbers of step-by-step instructions.

Comment: Training prepares students for very specific tasks. When the tasks change, students must be retrained. In the world of teachers and training, softwares change, operating systems change, and hardwares change. Change occurs endlessly. Being prepared to learn new software also invites the teacher to discover and use new software in unique ways.

Principle #6: The worst crime conceivable is to define the use of the computer too narrowly. Do not let 800 Pound Gorilla thinking dictate what technology is.

Comment: The computer is not just an internet appliance. It is not just a word processor. It is not just a slide show projector. It is not just a video mixer. It is not just a game machine. It is not just a business machine. It is all these things and more than anyone can imagine. It is an open-ended tool unlike any mankind has ever invented before. We must realize this and take advantage of it otherwise the digital-revolution will have failed.

Principle #7: Use software in creative and unexpected ways.

Comment: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to listen to music from far away places. He didn’t imagine it a tool of personal communication. Edison felt that people would travel to arcades to watch his short films on individual machines. He didn’t believe that audiences would watch movies in theaters. Leo Fender invented the Stratocaster guitar for country music. He couldn’t conceive what Jimi Hendrix would do with his invention. We must ask ourselves: what are the ways computers can be used to teach students which we are over-looking?

Principle #8: Just when you think you know the best educational use for technology, it changes. There is no best learning activity to use computers for learning.

Comment: How many times in the past have we been told what computers are supposed to do for education? First it was computer aided instruction (affectionately called “drill and kill”). Followed by hypertext. Followed by multi-media. Followed by the internet as a resource for publishing students work (except one can’t put up students' names or their pictures because of dirty, old predators and kidnapping non-custodial parents). Followed by the internet as the world’s largest library, online shopping mall, trivia repository, cesspool-of-hate-and-visual-rudeness which we must filter thoroughly before we allow kids near it. Followed by web logs..... Is there a pattern here?

The challenge of the 21st century will not only be how to use increasingly powerful and complex software, but even to conceptualize what it does. Software, in the best educational sense, will change the way the user thinks.