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Photo by Vernon Swanpoel. Creative Commons Copyright.
It's funny how serendipitous reading can be sometimes. A friend of mine, who was trying to get me involved in her home-based business, told me that "we draw things to us that are the object of our personal focus." Universal magnetism is an interesting concept, but this week (and today particularly) have proven to be the week of "the learning curve."
In reading Scott McLeod's latest blog post, I was struck with the similarities in posts I've read from Doug Johnson and Buffy Hamilton. Everyone seems to be talking about why there is a gap between the blogosphere and the average classroom teacher (and perhaps teacher librarian). Scott's comment that "the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore." really struck a chord with me.
On Monday, my school hosted Tracy Poelzer for a Pro-D presentation on IWB's and Web 2.0 tools. (Tracy Poelzer is our district's new Technology Coordinator.) Tracy freely admitted that the topics we had chosen were huge and way too much to cover adequately in one day. In the afternoon, as we began to address Web 2.0 tools, Tracy asked how many people had an i-Google page (or barring that - a personalized start up page that showed weather, RSS feeds and personal interest info. Only a handful of the 40 or so people present had something like that. Only 15 of the staff had Facebook pages. Everyone was relatively comfortable with email and liked the district's new Zimbra program. It was clear that all the tools Tracy was about to present were new to 90% of the staff: Voicethread, iGoogle, blogs and wikis. I knew that encouraging staff to use new tools was going to be an uphill battle - we've started a new timetable this year, so everyone is busily revamping their course outlines and lessons to align with shorter blocks. Although I would look at this as an opportunity to introduce many new tools, my colleagues clearly are in the same space that Steve Dembo is talking about: they don't know there are different coloured pills to be able to choose one or the other. The other issue will be finding the time to play with the technology.
I did a talk for Reading Specialists on Tuesday night. Several told me their heads were spinning and I imagine it is just the way I assume everyone is reading blogs, twittering, creating things using voicethread and animoto and the like.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way about all of this. A friend at the talk who I haven't seen for a while came up to me and asked, "How do you have time to do all of this?"
The answer is that the people that we are following have built that into their day - same with classroom blogging, etc. People are just making it a part of their day.
Nice post!