Technology Wonderings

I read a recent post by Jeff Utecht called “Getting my ducks in a row” where he outlined his plan for supporting teachers who receive laptops as part of their work. At my school 30 teachers purchased laptops this summer, for their personal use but most are planning on bringing it back and forth to school to support their teaching. I wonder how many of them would buy into a Teacher Technology IEP? I think it is a great way to set goals and focus your learning but considering these are technically “personal” machines I don’t know that my teachers would get excited about having their progress tracked throughout the year.

I love the support group idea where teachers using their laptops meet in small groups a couple of times a month for help troubleshooting and conversations about classroom impacts of their technology use. People all over the world are struggling to support teachers in an effective, constructive way. My school among them.

I’m having so much fun ning-ing. NH staff is designing a course and has set up a ning network to have some web-based collaboration. In addition to the NHS ning network, I belong to a couple of others Classroom2.0 and Digital Dialog and am really enjoying being a part of converstaions that are taking places across many time zones. It sure does make the world a whole lot smaller.

I was reading from the Fischbowl, one of the “must read” blogs for class. Karl Fisch is an educator who works with per-service teachers, presented at NECC, and seems to be pretty “with-it” when it comes to technology. He talks about a recent experience in an online chat: “I’m still learning how to be comfortable in real-time online conversations; they definitely don’t feel natural to me yet. It’s still hard for me to translate what’s in my head into relatively short sentences in real-time, and to keep up with multiple questions at the same time. And I do still feel somewhat at a loss without the face-to-face contact to get a better feel for how the conversation is going.”

I found this to validate what a lot of teachers are feeling. We’re told that we should participate in this chat or that webcast but for many people that is a huge, uncomfortable risk. It brings me back to the whole digital native/immigrant idea that adults are more comfortable talking face to face or atleast through some mode of audio. The fact that Mr. Fisch is recoginizing that he’s still a little uncomfortable with real-time online conversations makes me feel a little better about myself.

We’ve been having so much fun changing the theme of our blog and adding widgets and organizing sidebars that I’m worried that we’ll miss the point of the thing. This is a powerful communication tool but it is also something that we need to work at. I had the best of intentions when I set up my blog for school last summer. My goal was to get the kids writing and to update it every week. As school got started, it was easy to let the blog go. I hope that as I revitalize my blog this summer that people in the class will motivate me to keep posting. As we subscribe to each other’s blogs, it will be an easy way to stay in touch as the summer days end and the real work begins. Please help to keep me accountable for my posting here!!

Some teachers at my school are participating in a class that we are creating called “Self-Directed Learning”. Each person can pick an area of interest and build their own learning. We’re expecting kids to be able to do this without a whole lot of tools so the goal of the class is to become comfortable with the process as adults so we can better grasp how kids construct knowledge. Already, this R/W Web class is a model in self-directed learning. It helps to have a facilitator who is comfortable with this sort of format-one who can say, some people who want to work with the instructor in the front of the room, everyone else could work at the back of the room or out in the hall. People are tucked into their computers and multi-tasking to the max. Not every instructor/teacher is ok with this.

For my class, I’m self-directing myself to learn about web 2.0 tools!