To Blog or Not to Blog

Now that I have overcome my personal insecurities about blogging, I have decide that it is time to introduce my students to blogging. I am also determined to make 2008 the year that I get some of my colleagues more interested in integrating technology in their lessons.

In the past, I have presented a wide variety of technology integration ideas through mandated professional development. My colleagues have always been polite in participating in my professional development and have utilized some of the tools that the administration requested of them. But for the most part, the general consensus regarding technology is that classroom teachers are too overwhelmed with the requirements of the core curriculum and data collection to learn new technology skills to incorporate into their lessons. As a technology teacher and leader, this attitude was very frustrating because I felt that the technology and tools that our students had access to were a waste. I also felt like a failure because I couldn't change their attitude and opinion towards the benefits of technology integration and for a while I stopped pushing myself to improve my teaching.

Then earlier in this school year one of my former students, who is now a high school junior came to visit me. He showed me a website that he helped to design for the Mummers' Museum and his personal blog. He made me realize that what and how I teach matters most not to the adults that I am surrounded by, but to my students. I was very pleased to know that I may have inspired him to do more with technology after he left Vare. I am also a very competitive person and decided that I could not have a student showing me up ;-). That's when I started my own blog.

So now that my blog has been established, I started a blog for our students on David Warlick's classblogmeister. Their first blog posting is a response to an essay assignment that they did with their classroom teacher. After I post all of their comments and I share the blog with the rest of our staff, I'm hoping that other teachers will want their students to participate as well. If you have any tips on inspiring and motivating your colleagues to use more technology please share your ideas.

Trying Animoto

I recently joined Linda Nitsche's Math in the Real World collaborative project called Math Connections. On her project resource page, she lists a variety of web applications which could be used to share our students' work. The first one I tried was Animoto. This is a website which when you upload your pictures, you can choose music for them and the application will create a video, syncing the music and the images. Some of my 8th grade students were with me when I created this video and decided that they would like to use this for part of there graduation presentation. This is definitely a fun application worth trying even if it is only for personal purposes.