Jen’s Journey

An interesting article in the NY Times feed was “How to Ease the Pain in Setting up a Wi-Fi Network.”  I would like to accomplish this at my house and learned some good tips.

Of the many interesting blogs I read, two will be mentioned here.

Sir Ted Robinson spoke on the topic “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”  In a very entertaining speech he talked about how schools train children from the waist up, concentrating more on their heads as they get older.  Everyone is educated as if he/she was going to be a college professor.  He encouraged educators to think about how to train the whole child and keep the imagination and creativity alive.  Some people ARE meant to be musicians or dancers.

Vicki Davis’ blog “Spies Like Us” made me think for the first time about how students CAN record anything they want at school simply by using cell phones.  We have to be aware of what can happen in student or teacher lives if actions are recorded and used to embarrass or harm them.

Our students are very comfortable using and learning new technologies.   I would like to utilize more Web 2.0 sites in my classroom to engage them and also prepare them for college life and jobs.  I also want to instill in my students the love for lifelong learning and an understanding of how important it is for their futures. We need to practice using the WWW as a tool to aide learning and collaboration.  I want my students to be involved in the “web of people” that Tim Berners-Lee mentioned in his speech last December (2007) in California when referring to digital humanity. 

One tool I’ll use to support my own learning is the blog created to track learning as this course progresses.  I will gain from the process of hands-on “doing” and digesting the ideas of other people as I make a written record of my journey.  Hopefully, others will benefit also as they read my posts.

Because I teach computer skills and programming in high school, I am already constantly studying and learning new things every day.  My hope is as I learn more with this course that I will be able to organize my VERY OWN LEARNING TOOLBOX.  I want to be able to easily access information on all the different topics so that they can be used in the classroom later.

The easiest habit for me is accepting responsibility for my own learning.  I actively seek knowledge about technology on a daily basis, so I am excited to be part of this online course and be guided through specific tech areas.  As I learn and experiment with new topics I want to view problems as challenges.  Using technology can be frustrating in various ways–equipment failures and Internet downtime occur often.  I also have to work on time management because I WANT to click on every link to read any and all auxiliary materials about specific topics which makes the progress through lessons extremely slow.