Am I a digital teacher? Am I stupid or am I addicted to my job?

At our I-SITS meeting, Donna showed a video of a first year "digital teacher". The young woman in question was very definite in her opinions of her teaching methods and why they were the right ones for kids of the "digital generation". I found her presence irritating and arrogant and in response my back went up. Whatever she was saying might have been true, but I didn't want to listen to it.

On reflection, I wonder about my reaction to her. Is it that she is young, beautiful, and a recent graduate of UBC. (I checked her web page). Is it her definite "know-it-all attitude" that implies to my aging ears that she knows a whole lot more about effective teaching than I do. (I've been at it 29 years and I'm a graduate of the U of S Masters in Educational Communications program albeit 10 11 years ago.) In her defense, someone else has edited her talk, and perhaps presented her as being more forceful and know-it-all than she appears on the video.

I love being part of the I-SITS committee. I love the spirited debate, the thirst for knowledge, the camaraderie of educators that rejuvenates me and helps sustain me when I spend most of my weekend prepping "digital" lessons and marking. Right now, I'm trying to imagine this teacher or someone like her on this committee. Would she have anything to learn from us? Would she have the patience to teach us something or share with us her not-so-successful experiments in the classroom? I hope so. The video presentation doesn't leave me hopeful.

As I said, I've been teaching somewhere around 29 years. I'm still "prepping my face off". I feel guilty if I use the same lesson and lesson plan more than once without revising and enriching it. Somewhere in all of this, my "real life" continues to suffer? Am I stupid, inefficient or addicted to my job? I don't know. I still love to teach and prep lessons. I'd also really like a "life."

A plea to those of partisan politics; Please teach me something I didn't know.

Here we go again. Another Canadian election is happening possibly as soon as this fall. The last one wasn't supposed to happen because Prime Minister Harper and his ruling Conservatives had passed a law mandating Canadian elections be held once every four years. Hmm....the last election was against the law and almost no Canadians wanted to have it. This possible coming election is equally as popular as the last one.

South of the border there is a never-ending stream of partisan politics Republicans versus Democrats. Right now, the rhetoric concerns universal health care. We Canadians - at least many of us - look smugly and condescendingly upon Americans for their "pay-per-use" healthcare. Is healthcare in Canada truly as good as we think it is? Are there any reasoned and calm Republicans out there who can explain to Canadians why publicly-funded healthcare is not what we think it is?

Could everybody please stop with the mud-slinging and scare tactics? When you persist, I tune you out.

I am pleading with people of all political persuasions to please teach me something I don't already know. Provide me with facts and figures and the results of reputable studies. Treat me like I am a world citizen hungry for knowledge to help me make my own mind up about economics, politics, and social good. I'm not stupid. I want to be informed.

The somewhat open, social, and highly connected wedding.

As my FaceBook and Flickr friends know, my oldest step-daughter, Jennifer, was married last week at her mother's country residence. The bride was beautiful, the groom handsome, the wedding party stunning, the location breathtaking, and the weather perfect. How did Web 2.0 have, and not have, a role in the wedding.

First, my step-daughter keeps a blog. The official announcement of the relationship happened sometime in March of 2008. We were treated to pictures and stories about their shared adventures in the Caribbean and at the Medical University of the Americas.

We did meet Brandon, then the "significant other" at Christmastime of 2008. It was a face-t0-face visit and turkey dinner at our house.

Officially the wedding announcement didn't happen until invitations were sent out. An official wedding site was created, and prospective guests had the option of confirming or declining their presence on the website. The gift registry was on Amazon.com.

The "bride-to-be" kept us updated on her blog. Upon returning to Saskatchewan to study fot her US medical licensing exam, Mondays were reserved for wedding plans. She updated her blog faithfully.

The bride and groom had arranged photographers from Edmonton to pictorially document the wedding and the wedding rehearsal. People like me, the evil-wicked-stepmother, had a field day taking digital photos (I snapped over 200).

Interestingly enough, no one "officially" videotaped the wedding. I'm thinking that photographs are moments in time from the point of view of the photographer. We can use the images to pique our own memories and feelings of the event. I'm not sure a video could evoke being there in the same way. Unless one could be there, physically. for the event, I think photos are the next best thing.

The bride and groom took off the next day so the bride could start her clinical rotations in Oklahoma city. We the family, check her blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts regularly. After the wedding, guests have been uploading images to the group Flickr site.

Life goes on. Some of it gets shared via Web 2.0.

Why I Really Liked Being on the In-School Technology Committee

I've always known why I love being in Educational Technology. It isn't machines, or computer scripts, or games, or....

The real reason I love it so much is that I get to indulge my passion for eclecticism and to hang out with an eclectic group of people all concerned with teaching and learning. We all come from different academic and technical backgrounds so for us to "talk shop" we need to focus on how we teach not what we teach. I can't think of getting any closer to educational heaven than that!!!

What Have I Learned? A Response to the REAL Gary's Post

What is the most recent thing I've learned as a teacher? I've been mulling that over since Gary wrote his post and put out the "challenge". I guess I have to haul out my "dirty little secrets" about why I wanted to become a teacher in the first place.

Way back when (1976) when I finally finished my first degree (Arts 4 year, sociology) I began to re-ponder the question..."What do I want to be when I grow up?" I'd had one disastrous (for me) year in the (now defunct) College of Home Economics (I wanted to learn interior design). I'd always said I didn't want to become a teacher; however when I sat down to look at my career options one of the things I always like to do is learn. It seemed to me at that time that teaching was a logical choice to meet that need.

Even though teaching has been difficult (I'm a pretty hardcore introvert) it has met my need to learn (and learn and learn....). Teaching is never dull. If it becomes dull (for me) it means I need to learn something new which has meant going back to university ... in 1981 -82 to study special education, and in 1994 to start a masters in educational communications.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm teaching something new just for the sake of meeting my need for novelty as opposed to being a truly innovative teacher. Am I meeting my students' academic needs or are we just mucking around in the unknown for the sake of doing it? Is it even ethical to depart from the "tried and true" in order to forge new pedagogical territory? My step-daughter has just finished five semesters of medical education; her studying arsenal includes piles of flashcards to prepare her to write multiple choice exams.

. I know I have to follow "the curriculum". My experience and what I have learned from my studies in grad school don't always match up to what "the curriculum" tells me to do. Teaching ro me is a never-ending series of questions, and experiments in order to teach my students effectively.

Inspired by the TL Summit and Cool Math Teachers...

This morning as I was driving my 1 hour drive to Hafford, I had a "ping" moment. My students could take definitions from their geometry unit and with the help of a drawing program create slide images to explain these geometric concepts. I could import them into Windows Movie Maker, or just put them on a Google Docs slide show and post it in our blog.

Yesterday, I had all my students copy a portable program that cannot be named into their documents folder. This program has draw tools that can create circle pies. While the student creates them, he/she can see the exact angle of the pie in a tiny window. I wanted them to have some practice creating and measuring angles, as well as learn how to use draw tools. (Never teach anything that doesn't go with at least 3 other things I always say; it's the wardrobe planning method of instructional design...but I digress).

Today with the same program, each student created a slide and we exported them to .gif. I learned that I had to save the documents to their accounts and then copy them to the homework file, rather than saving them directly the homeowrk file.

Kids said it was the most fun they'd had in a math class. I guess I'd better not do this again. School, especially math class, is supposed to be miserable.

Educational Reform = Societal Reform

I think education has become the scapegoat of society. Schools are expected more and more to perform the duties that only a whole, well-functioning and integrated society can.

I remember some things learned back in my caveperson university days, an era when calculators had just replaced slide rules. I remember learning that schools are a reflection of the communities they serve. If this is true, (I think it is) then it is nearly pointless to ponder educational reform until social reforms take place.

It would seem in our society that we have compartmentalized everything, for example religion, food production, commerce, health care, families, child rearing, elder care, education of the young, safety. We have created experts and institutions for each of these social functions. These experts and institutions tend not to take any responsibility for matters not considered under their authority. The individual must deal with a dizzying number of experts and institutions in order to just survive from day to day.

Somehow in our 21st century world we are getting worse and worse at effectively meeting the needs of the people who live here. Society needs to function as a whole unit since a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Until we world citizens can de - compartmentalize our institutions and learn to communicate and effectively problem solve together, I don't think anything will get much better, and probably will get a whole lot worse.