Where are my attitudes several months later?

So, how do I feel about 21st century skills many months later. I sit today on the last day of a 4 day course on the interactive 21st century classroom. We've talked about software for an interactive whiteboard, Active Inspire, Google Docs and tools, online authoring tools such as Xtranormal, VoiceThread, and Glogster, and now Blogs and Wikis.

I continue to take professional development around the topic of the 21st century classroom because I want to make sure that I keep current with the trends in education right now. It moves so fast. However, I feel the students jump ahead with more "trendy" popular technology which is not necessarily the trend in education. So I am torn.

So what is important for us to teach? Should we teach to the reality of our students' lives or the things that are meaningful for them? Should we figure out how to incorporate Facebook into our classrooms - using SPS Social Media or Moodle - which they will see as not cool simply because it is in our curriculum.

What is the balance? How do we decide as educators how to make these decisions? Are we the "experts"?

My next steps will be taking some of the online authoring tools and providing alternative assignments for our typical responses. We'll see.