Comments on: Who you gonna call?

By: Frank's Blog

Frank's Blog — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:22:47 +0000

I’m still trying to get teachers to see the advantages of communicating with email. Even though that seems like a little step, it isn’t easy.

Frank
Faces of Web 2.0 ★ 21st Century Teachers

By: kwhobbes

kwhobbes — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:59:28 +0000

Thanks Nick. I’ll do something on this later in a post.
Stephanie – we’re reaching that point where many of us are able to recognize that a tool might be good to introduce and then helping everyone with it. I know that I’ve done that with the wiki. We use it in school as a staff, our teacher’s association uses it to keep up with information and I use it with my students for my class. I will be introducing it to my teachers as a planning tool and an organizing tool. I’m using it with my family to plan a get together this summer. In all these cases, most of the people involved were very novice tech users. They were ready and it has worked great. I’ll now be moving on to the next tool – online desktop. Why? Because I see a niche that it can fill for the teachers and students. After that – some other tool that will be needed to fill a need.

By: Stephanie Sandifer

Stephanie Sandifer — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:48:34 +0000

I’ve been thinking these kinds of thoughts recently myself. I’ve started thinking “bite-sized” instead of “super-sized meal deal”.

I’ve also returned to thoughts about previous experiences implementing tech training on another campus where we categorized all of the teachers into groups and targeted the training based on the category. I guess you could say we used “tracking” because we labeled teachers as “beginner,” “intermediate,” and “advanced” tech users.

But you are correct about focusing on one tool at a time. The more skilled we are with the new tools, and the more skilled we are at “coaching” new users, the better we will be at recognizing when and where each tool is appropriate so we can introduce new tools, one at a time, at the moment when users need the tool. Hopefully, the “need” will correspond with “openness” to learning and using the new tool.

We also have to continue being model users and learners as you described in your last paragraph.

Stephanie

By: Nick Pernisco

Nick Pernisco — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:16:37 +0000

Thanks for linking back to my article at the Change Agency blog. I encourage you and your site's visitors to check out my media literacy website and blog for more resources on this important topic. UnderstandMedia.com