On-Task Blogging

Some of our blogging friends have already commented about the success of our Tuesday morning meeting. I had a wonderful time and I hope you did too.

Since that time, I have had conversations with some people about getting "on-task" with their blogging. Remember, the purpose of our blogs is to share what we have tried or what we have learned as we experiment with implementing lessons that use technology.

But, I don't want you to feel guilty for using your blog to post something unrelated to our goal. The process of acquiring knowledge to enable you to infuse technology into your teaching requires that you first become comfortable with technology for yourself -- use it to suit your own purposes, whether it be for word processing, e-mailing friends, organizing family photos digitally, paying your bills online - whatever! (You will notice that I used the word "infuse". When I was thinking about the topic of this blog and the progression of technology competence in teaching, I remembered our first blogging assignment - "list two sites that you use for teaching and two sites that you like to visit for your own enjoyment" I must have thought of the word "infuse" because I remembered one of my favorite sites for my own enjoyment, the Mighty Leaf Tea Company. I visited this site just before I started this blog. You'll have to go there sometime - I think it's relaxing, I can almost smell the Earl Grey drifting from the liquid crystals in my computer screen!)

The next step is to "infuse" technology into your lessons -- use online resources to find lesson plans or printables, find some great websites that illustrate the point you have tried to get across, make your own technology-based resources to teach a unit.

The final and ultimate step is to become aware of the impact technology will have on our students. Their lives will be influenced by technologies that we can't even begin to imagine. It is our duty to start now to make this a way of life for them. I read an article in a class I took last spring that introduced me to the concept of Mindtools. We need to teach our kids to think of the technologies that are available to them as "mindtools". Here's how I see it. I have taken piano lessons since I was 4 years old. I am not a good note reader. I spent 20 years of my life as a frustrated pianist because I did not have the skills to take the beautiful melody that was flowing through my head and tell my fingers how to do it. In my mid-twenties, I started taking lessons from a teacher who had mastered this form of note-less piano playing for himself, and had become so comfortable with it that he was able to teach me how to do it. I'm not perfect, but I'm a whole lot better than I used to be.

The application here is that all it took was a teacher who was comfortable with using the methods for himself to teach me how to take what was in my head and make some sense out of it. We need to help our kids take all of the information they have stored in their heads and use the computer to make sense out of it - make it into something that they can share with others.

Make this blog about you AND your teaching. Little vacations from the topic at hand are perfectly acceptable - they represent who you are, what you like and why you're good at what you do!

Isn't blogging fun?