Into the classroom I walk...nay, saunter. I got swagger, I got moxie. I got a brand-new technological pair of rollerskates, as it were.
I am a teacher in a golden age of computerized doodads. Life is sweet.
Then, as quick as I saunter, I begin to sway. I wobble. I swoon.
Blogs. Vlogs. Flipped classrooms. Vodcasting. Podcasting. Glogster. Google docs, maps, translate, calendar, et cetera ad nauseum, not to mention the 46,000 or so other technologies I am omitting.
Oh, plus screencasting. There's that, too.
There are so many new and magical tools to use, and so little day to learn how to use them.
Sometimes I wish I had a convenient drug habit that kept me up all night. I could do so much.
But I digress. Oh, do I ever digress. I digress so very, very much. Digress to a fault, you could say. Digression. Oppression. Depression. Regression. Concession.
Ugh.
Anyway, we teachers need to include these tools in order to hold our students' fleeting attentions. We can't pretend they don't exist, and we can no longer mourn the loss of our precious free time. We just have to dive in with both feet. It's more about overcoming your own fear and exasperation with the instantaneous pace of technology than it is about the technology being an inconvenience.
For example, I was a bit intimidated by Google docs the first time I learned about it. Yeah, I took the summer Google institute (twice) in consecutive Junes, but I was still nervous about the implementation of it in my classroom. I felt like I would forget to check it, that I would let students down with the slowness of my feedback. Mostly, I felt like my feeble brain would not be able to handle keeping track of yet another thing.
And yeah, I forgot to check it for weeks on end. I forgot, and felt terrible, and caught reprimands from students who wanted my input on their writing. But, eventually (very eventually), I began to remember. Just like I finally learned, sometime during my third year, to do attendance, so, too, did I learn to check my Google account daily.
I haven't made the leap to full-fledged online publishing of assignments, but I am a sloth in a speedboat world. I am getting there. I have to.
We owe it to our students to make classrooms a place that are connected to the world they know, that operate under the same set of rules. The longer we cling to our antiquated practices, the more we risk obsolescence.
Our students are social monsters, or are at least in the grips of the social monster the world has become. In order to cater to the mindset that everyone out there wants to know about everything you do, we need to focus more on publishing content to the world than we do on producing work for a single, sad, lonely human stuffed behind a desk like a wad of cotton stuffed in...some kind of orifice. A mouth, maybe.
Those aforementioned swoon-inducers that I mentioned are just the tools we need in order to reach this lofty goal. Blogging as a teacher, and supporting student-created blogs and websites, is one important way we can support the publishing of students' work. Google docs and its ability to share a single document among multiple users has been an invaluable resource for me personally when it comes to peer-editing and conferencing in my classroom.
Those other tools I mentioned, the vodcasts and screencasts and all of that goodness...well, that's all in the works for me. All things in time, as they say.
For now, it's one technological baby-step at a time. That's the best I can do, and it's all I can promise myself at this time. No drugs. No time-turner (yet).
We owe a lot to our students, but we owe it to ourselves, as well, to take these things slowly.
Saunter. Swagger. Swoon.
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