Some Thoughts …

Peggy Sheehy

 

First let me state that I am presently at the Building Learning Communities Conference hosted by Alan November (BLC08).  It is my second year at the conference and it is a wonderful event.  People from all over the world attend and the opportunities for learning and networking are phenomenal.  I have gathered many wonderful ideas from this event and hope to take these ideas back to share in my district.  That being said…I want to share some thoughts that I have each time I attend an educational technology conference like this.

 

The theme seems to always be “We’ve got to change, change, change”…”We’ve got to prepare for the future!”…We have to change the way we teach!  Students are not the same as they were when we were young!”   Yet…where are the answers?  Where is the “how”?  I feel like I’m in a house on fire with no doors.  I feel the urgency to get out…I know what I need to do…but no one is showing me the exit!  They yell “GET OUT!”  There are no doors or windows.  I know I have to create one…but how?

 

I keep hearing people state “we want people to start asking questions, to start thinking.”  True…but many educators “do not know what they don’t know”.  I want people to start developing answers and to show educators “how” to start finding their own answers.  Granted there were a few sessions at the conference that did just this.  Sonny Magata’s session  21st Century Learning Communities was absolutely incredible.  Not only was the information he gave relevant in showing a teacher how a student learns, he modeled wonderful techniques using the promethean board.    Peggy Sheehy’s session From Good Intentions to Best Practices:  Ramapo Islands Year 2 was extremely inspiring.   And while most districts are eons from incorporated virtual classrooms with avitars into their school environment, I do strongly believe this will be the classroom of tomorrow.  

 

I urge today’s ed tech leaders to stop lecturing schools as to what they are doing wrong and start teaching them how to do it right. 

 

 

Is Your Life Chaotic? Simplify it With Technology!

This was a concurrent session that I conducted at the Upstate Technology Conference this year.  The session was really directed at simplifing one’s life outside the classroom.  We discussed Google Documents, Google Calendar, Bloglines and Jott.  Jott seemed to be the tool that attracted the most interests and responses.  If you are not familiar with Jott….try it out.  It does quite a few things but what interested teachers the most was the ability to call Jott, leave a message, have it converted to text and then have the text sent to their son or daughter’s cell phone.

Is this of educational value?…maybe not..but it’s my experience that if you can get someone excited about one piece of technology then they are much more approachable about other areas.