Initial Thoughts
October 17th, 2007
With excitement and anxiousness, we move forward into the “blogging” world. Excited about the professional opportunities that will abound through technology, but anxious about the time committment, opening up my thoughts and ideas to the world, the opportunity for destructive criticism by the cynical minority, or the reality that elementary school students are further ahead the the Principal of the Middle School.
I am willing and able to move forward with this experience and I look forward to working together with the staff and others for the benefit students.
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5 Responses to “Initial Thoughts”
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See also:
- Reflections on Washington, DC 2008 (April 25th, 2008)
- YouTube, Itube, We all tube?! (November 14th, 2007)
- Hello world! (October 4th, 2007)
October 17th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
[...] at The Round Table sums up much of the excitement and trepidation in his first blog post: Excited about the professional opportunities that will abound through technology, but anxious [...]
October 17th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
You will be amazed at the opportunities that will become available to you through the connections, i.e. network, you can create through blogging.
Here’s one small example. I run a google search for my name, my projects and their urls. I pull the search results into my RSS reader. Yesterday that feed led me to Mr. Biche’s class blog where he told his students people were blogging with astronauts on the International Space Station. That’s our project. I commented on Mr. Biche’s blog, and to make a long story short, his class will now be joining us as we learn about living and working in orbit. Rick and I have added each other to our Twitter list and in essence to our personal learning networks. All from a blog post!
BTW, don’t worry about the students being ahead – they’re not. They aren’t afraid of the technology; they know which buttons do what; but they need teachers to help them learn how to learn.
Diane
Diane Hammond
Curriculum Consultant
YES I Can! Science
McMaster University
October 18th, 2007 at 6:46 am
Often the “cynical minority” are folks who are more afraid of the new than we are of their distructive criticism. The wall that they can erect stops us from pushing them to face their challenges, they are protecting themselves. I think the most important thing we can do is to push them to challenge themselves, if they won’t change then perhaps they will learn to keep their criticism to themselves.
October 18th, 2007 at 8:31 am
“anxious about… opening up my thoughts and ideas to the world” .
I’ve read these concerns in many of our opening posts. It strikes me that these are the same kinds of risks we hope that our students will take every day, on paper and in conversations. As teachers, many of us have become so comfortable expressing ourselves in classrooms that we have forgotten how much confidence and comfort doing so requires of our students. This blogging endeavor seems to me to provide us the rare opportunity to take ourselves out of our comfort zones, learning and writing to an audience not only of our peers, but of the world at large. The risks we take to participate in the blogging world will clearly pay off in innumerable, unexpected ways as we hook in to a web of ideas and inspiration far beyond what is available within the physical limits of our building.
Furthermore, I hope our students will benefit not only from the technological tools we are exploring, but also from the humility we may be experiencing!
November 9th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
“opening up my thoughts and ideas to the world”
Kevin, I am excited that you are on board with what your staff is doing. The success of our school lies in dedicated professionals as yourself who are willing to try new things and expand outside of their comfort zone. Although I am pretty comfortable talking about anything to anyone anywhere, my students are not. For my students, having a class blog, google reader, and using google docs has helped the students succeed not only in my classroom but they have built tools they will use in the future. All students feel they can succeed on the computers and are handing in work far more intelligent than ever seen before. So, as educators it is our job to open our minds, try out things beyond our comfort zones and dive into the Web 2.0 world. We need to do this because that is what our students are asking us to do. If we cannot come out of our shell how can we ask our students to? So, welcome to the world of blogging!