Trends to watch- how should educators respond?

I was reading an online article today from eweek.com called ‘Five trends to watch in 2009’.  Their focus audience is small to medium size business. The five trends to watch as they saw it were;

1. Cloud Computing.

2. Virtualisation

3. Notebook/Netbook adoption

4. Open Source Software

5. Online Social Networking

My question is, are we as educators onto this? If we are going to effectively prepare our students for the workplaces they will be entering, shouldn’t we be incorporating some of these applications into our teaching environments and curriculum?

I work in a 1:1 school, but as we see the cost of computers and wireless air devices reduce I could envisage students fronting up in both private and public education with their own computers with internet access at the ready. I’m wondering if schools are prepared for this?

* Update –  Many students today have phones with internet access – don’t know why I didn’t think of this when I was writing this post. Just dim sometimes! Once again though, many schools take the no phones in class policy when they should be capitalising on the incredibly powerful tool students have at their disposal.

I know that this year I intend to make greater use of the cloud and create and store more of my documentation using online applications. It just makes sense. It’s something I intend to share with my students and will be encouraging them to use Google docs and notebook.   

These are ideas we need to keep at the forefront of our thinking if we are going to best prepare our students for the workplaces they will be entering.