Know the Unknowns

So now that my class is over, do I continue to blog?  Yes. . .no. . .maybe?  Blog for business or pleasure?  I will continue to blog in the job–I don’t see myself as blogging just as a hobby or for human interest, because I don’t have much of a life to blog about outside of work.  Of course as I say that, it occurs to me that I could blog about my love for and knowledge of rabbits.  Unfortunately, I don’t feel that I’m going to have lot of time for blog pleasure, at least, not at this point.  I do hope to enlighten many of our teachers about blogging, so I’ll be blogging in that respect, at least.  It is a good way to let out some of my rambling thoughts.

I’m suffering from information overload here. All this new technology is exciting, but I’m afraid I’m the proverbial old dog here, and I don’t know if I’m capable of learning any new tricks. Most of my students (I teach Algebra I Part II right now) don’t seem to have any interest in learning, no matter how I try to present the material to them. We’ve tried a lot of strategies to motivate them–we being me and the SPED teacher I work with in our inclusion classes. It’s hard for me to be excited about blogs and podcasts and such when I know that my enthusiam won’t be contagious throughout my classroom. I’ll just try to continue fighting the good fight and working on it.

As I work on our current assignment on podcasting, streaming video, etc., I continue to revel in amazement of how far we’ve come with technology.  I was discussing the evolution of music earlier with some individuals in my office, both of whom are parents (I have rabbits, not kids.)  They were discussing how we’ve gone from records (apparently, these were prehistoric musical media) to tapes, to cds, to tiny MP3 players that store an amazing amount of data.  Early in my teaching career ( early 90s), I ordered a videotape from ATT that looked into the future of technology.  My students at the time were amazed at the idea of having a telephone that would allow you to see the person on the other end–even overseas and being able to control machines by voice.  We never imagined back then that we would see that technology in our lifetimes.  I remember how thrilled I was when I got my first cd burner; I couldn’t imagine back then that sooner than later, I’d be able to buy a 8 gig jumpdrive for practially nothing.  But back to the immediate topic at hand–podcasting.  I created my first podcast recently, a narrative of our division’s emergency management guide for parents, which we posted on our website.  Rather simple, but I was proud of it.  I am not a classroom teacher at this point; however, as a former business/info tech teacher, I can see myself focusing more on students creating podcasts as creative works rather than using podcasts created by others.  One project my classes always completed was an oral presentation (with a PowerPoint, of course) of a research paper they completed on a technology-related subject.  I can see now that such a project could really go global through podcasting.  I love PowerPoint, but I know that sometimes we can be PowerPointed to death!  It’s an exciting (and scary time) to be in education.

Ok, so my thoughts are not too wicked–I mean, wiki-d!  I’ve had to overcome my own hangups on this one, because I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.  I had previously signed on for a collaborative project for educators in a consortium we belonged to.  A university across the state was involved in the project, and it sounded like a fantastic thing–we were going to communicate through this brand-new thing (this was a couple of years ago) called a wiki.  Problem was, we didn’t communicate.  The professional development and guidance that we were supposed to have never came, and I think that many of us just let the project fade, because no one seemed to care.  What a sad story.

 I’ll put away the Kleenex and violin music now.  I’m giving this wiki thing another chance.  I plan on introducing some of our fearless faculty to the wiki, and step out of the way while they run with it!  Not that I’ll leave them hanging, but I expect wonderful things. 

I have mixed feelings about the use of Wikis. In some ways, I feel that Wikis can be extremely good tools for collaboration among students and teachers. However, I can’t help coming back to the fact that a Wiki is only as good as the information added to it by it’s participants. I’m currently taking college English again (with my son) and his English instructor refuses to accept Wikipedia as a source. While I understand this to an extent, I also feel that she is losing a good teaching opportunity there. In a perfect world, a wiki would be the ultimate teaching tool, because our students would be learning from each other, and so would we as teachers. In reality, depending on the maturity of the students, there can be issues, but if we approach wikis in the correct way and supervise our students, we can have an overall positive experience.

Slowly but surely, the lightbulb is coming on, and this stuff is making sense. Incidently, if my 20 year old son was here, he’d say, “Don’t call me Shirley.” (He’s a big Airplane! fan.) There are still a lot of buttons that I’m leery of, but I think I have the general idea of what my most recent task is supposed to do–RSS feeds. I don’t have a lot of time to read, at least not as much as I need, but having the ability to pick and choose what I get info on will hopefully give me quality info when I do have a chance to read up a little.

A few weeks ago, I didn’t even know what a blog was. Now, I’m still not sure what a blog is, but I’m doing it! I’m a little apprehensive with any new technology; it’s just hard to keep up when you have so much administrative work to do!

As I jump headfirst into a big pool of technology, I hope that lots of you throw me a line! There’s a lot I want to learn from and hopefully share with others.

Still trying to find my way around here.  I didn’t think there was this much to it. . .