Reflections

David Truss :: Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts http://feeds.feedburner.com/pairadimes

I found this site by searching on Technorati for “integration technology +k12”. This blog was one of the first in the list and I found the author to be very experienced in teacher education and insightful. The entry that caught my eye is titled “Do not go quietly into your classroom” which is similar to the title of my blog, “Do not go gentle into that dark night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” The originating website is very simple looking and easy to navigate. The author of the blog is a Vice Principal in Canada and is interested in student leadership, numeracy, social responsibility, and integrating technology into the classroom. I can see this site being useful to me, probably not right now but in the future. My goal is to become a technology coordinator in a k12 district. I would sincerely like to help the teachers integrate technology into their classrooms via workshops and one-on-one training.

EdTech K-12: Lesson Plan Feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdtechK-12LessonPlans?format=xml

This site was found by performing a Google search for “teacher training +k12 classroom”. I was attracted to the title “Lesson Plans”. The feed originates from a site for EdTech Magazine which has two focuses: K12 and higher education. After checking it out, I felt that the K12 side of the site appeared to be a good resource for helping k12 teachers incorporate technology into their current lesson plans. This suits my goals of becoming a tech coordinator in a k12 environment.


If I described everything I learned in reading this textbook I couldn’t contain it to a paragraph or two. I am so excited to share my new knowledge with my sister who is a 5th grade teacher interested in teaching technology courses. I really liked the author’s conversational writing style, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s a Cubs fan! The author is apparently very excited at the concept of making personal connections on the web. One of my favorite sites the book recommends is 43Things.com. It provides a fast easy way to make personal connections but more importantly, it gives a person a reason to reflect and plan for their own lives. I can certainly understand the attraction to being noticed through blogs – it’s like being anonymously popular. And that’s just one aspect of it. All people can have an archive of their entire lives on the web that can be found with simple searching. Of course this has its downfalls, but the very idea was unheard of when I was born – and I’m not that old!

I’m still anxious to get more familiar with RSS feeds. I don’t feel like I quite have my mind wrapped around the concept yet - probably because of the enormity of it. I think it’s obvious that it will become a highly used application. Then again, people thought that about CD’s too. Then there’s social bookmarking. I would describe social bookmarking sites as search engines that are created by public users instead of by web crawlers. I could go on and on and on about the educational applications of all these web tools. I believe the only reason they are not already in common use in education is simply because the teachers don’t have the training necessary to integrate them. This motivates me more to become a tech coordinator in k12 where I can help teachers do exactly that.
The only thing about the book that made me uncomfortable is that it is very pragmatic. I worry about the “truth” that will be created through collaborative thinking. I mean, really – I believe that truth is a constant and cannot be changed by opinions of the current culture. Society should be learning how not to be sucked in at the same rate they are learning how to read new truths on the Internet. Think of the implications of a large company or “big brother” using blogs to deceive people. Conspiracy Theorism will be the next new bachelor’s degree :)