Technology Facilitator

When this semester started, I was not looking forward to taking a course on being a technology facilitator. If the course had not been required for the masters, I certainly would not have chosen it.

Having just finished the course, though, my ideas have turned around 100%. The most important thing I learned is how little difference one teacher can make. I find a lot of value in integrating technology into my classes, but if I am the only teacher doing this, I can only reach 100-some students each year. If I can reach even a quarter that number of teachers, I can have a much bigger impact in terms of increasing the technology students get to use.

This course also got me looking at teaching from a different perspective. For the first time, I could see the interesting questions that get asked when one is looking at how to run a district rather than just how to successfully guide students through a particular curriculum. I hope to continue to explore some of these ideas next year as I engage in research for my thesis.

Why Blog?

Yesterday I had one of those "Aha!" moments as I was reading Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. While I follow and learn a lot from many blogs I read, I had never felt the inclination to blog myself. I have read a number of provocative articles on using blogs in the classroom but, again, I was not quite convinced that I wanted to do this.

One of the principles Johnson refers to is how important it is to write everything down. If you don't record your ideas, hunches, and questions when you have them, you will not have a record of your thoughts to bounce future ideas, hunches and questions off of. In Darwin's age (and widely before and after that time), people regularly kept "commonplace books" as records of their thoughts. That practice has long since disappeared, but I imagine that nowadays blogs can serve much the same function, but with a twist. A blog is not only a place where I can record my present thoughts so that my future self can explore them; it is also a place where others can explore what I am thinking. This ability to engage in dialogue is one that has tremendous value, as it gives all of us the potential to make progress connecting ideas more quickly.

I look forward to using this blog to explore this idea more in the future, and I welcome your comments as you travel the road of ideas along with me.

Digital Storytelling Workshop

I found it amusing to look back at this post, because it made it easy to see how much progress I had made. Yesterday I presented a workshop on digital storytelling to 15 teachers of NJATJ. During the two-hour workshop, teachers learned how to use digital storytelling with students and how to create projects in Fotobabble, Photo Story and Movie Maker.

In spite of all the difficulties I experienced initially, I am now a published user of digital technology (look at kbesssin on You Tube or check out my Educational Technology website). To me, this truly shows that if I can do it, anyone can!