A Teacher’s Thoughts

As the year begins it is exciting to see others at my school willing to jump in and explore web 2.0 tools. Currently two teachers have started blogs which they will or are using for their students and a third wants to move forward with a wiki. As our school goes through physical renovation, we are able to purchase some much needed upgrades to our technology. We have formed a committee, dedicated to meeting weekly to advise the process. Although I agree with Dennis Harter and Justin Medved about the naming of such a committee. And I think Jeff Utecht and others have a good idea of direction in thinking as well. Change will come more efficiently and better informed if we focus on literacy. Here are my thoughts on direction.

Our first goal should be to define the purpose of technology in our school. In order to do this we need to do the following:

1. Understand what will be required of our students in the 21st century (this goes to the heart of literacy and its full definition)
2. Investigate current practices (globally) in educational technology
3. We should also look to see what is currently described as best practices in technology use
4. Both of these previous two should include the collection of resources and examples

Teacher modeling has been mentioned frequently in my reading and I couldn’t agree more. At the heart of this is teacher learning. So I hope we can agree to use a wiki to organize our own thoughts on this and make the process transparent for those who would like to observe. Additionally, I would hope that I can bring others into the blogosphere.