I finally had a chance to see Jeff Utecht at the ISACS conference recently. I’ve been a long-time reader of his blog but I still love to hear people present in person.
“We are not teaching technology, we are teaching skills that every student needs to have and technology happens to be a part of that. Create can be met with paper and pencil, with glue and scissors, with a hammer and nail, or with movie maker and it should be the job of every teacher to expose students to different ways of creating content that fits within their discipline.”
Absolutely. This has been the biggest shift in how we talk about technology at our school in the past 7 years. It is not “just a tool” and but rather a way of creating, analyzing, evaluating, applying, understanding. A way of thinking. Jeff’s whole post is worth reading, because I think it neatly sums up expectations for using technology.
We’ve chosen to use the NCTE’s 21st century literacies as our goals for our students. Previously, we had a mess of functions to master in specific software. If we are able to educate students to create, communicate, and collaborate using any software or technology (broadly defined) that is at their disposal, I think we’ll be doing well by those goals.
Looks like I missed the anniversary date by just a few days. The blog has taken a back seat to some of the more immediate concerns of life, and yet, I’d like to get back here more to reflect on things. I enjoy writing, and still believe in the “blog” as the democratizing force for publishing. You can keep twitter, Facebook and the rest. Owning your work, in a way that you simply can’t with the other sites is important.
I wanted to reflect for a moment on the changes and the sames from my life a bit. A Top 5. This is harder than I thought, actually. There are plenty of material things that are different in my life… plenty of world changes in the past 10 years. But day-to-day life changes are actually relatively small in number. I’m thankful that this list is small, and that the changes are all positive and stable. It could so easily be different from positive and stable changes.
Same: 1. Married to my wonderful and beautiful wife, and our eleven year anniversary is coming up very soon. 2. Yeti our dog. Still the same old Yeti. She was actually the original inspiration for this blog. 3. Same general geographical location. 4. Same favorite band (Radiohead). 5. Same political leanings. My two most important issues: environment, wars.
Changes: 1. and 2. Kids! Two of them. Total chaos. 3. New job. 4. New house. 5. New city.
I wonder what the next ten years will hold? Go back to school? (I am actually the only one of my siblings and their spouses without a Masters’ degree or higher) New job? Car-free lifestyle?
A technical note, I’ve managed to keep this blog running for 10 years without any major hiccups. It started out with MovableType and moved to WordPress in 2004.
Thanks to everyone who continues to check in on my little slice of the internet…
“U.S. oil production is on track to hit its highest level since 1993. What has that done to gas prices for consumers? Virtually nothing. Yet again, analysts are pointing out the obvious: even with massive increases in domestic oil drilling, the impact on gasoline prices is minimal. That’s because oil is a global market and U.S. supplies — even with historic increases — still don’t make a major dent.”
“But this year, the American Family Association, a conservative evangelical group, has called the project ‘a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools’ and is urging parents to keep their children home from school on Oct. 30, the day most of the schools plan to participate this year.”
“But what stuck in my craw is that Romney insists on housing these sickly, imagined uninsured people in apartments. I think it’s safe to say Romney isn’t much of an apartment guy. But though it’s probably accurate that homeowners are less likely to be uninsured than renters, it sounds to me like Romney’s caricatured lower class people in his mind and let it color the way he talks about their problems. If you’re uninsured, you can’t possibly have it together enough to own property, and, hey, probably you live in squalor too.”
“Even more stunning were the events of September 22. In a pre-planned protest, the citizens of Benghazi marched 30,000 strong, calling for Islamist militias to be disbanded and incorporated into the national army. Some of the protesters carried banners memorializing Chris Stevens and chanted pro-American slogans. At the end of their march, the protesters ransacked the headquarters of the militias responsible for the consulate attack and drove them out of town. In a parallel action, the Libyan government redoubled its ongoing drive to clear militias from Tripoli. The Libya Herald attributed this action in part to the death of Ambassador Stevens, who was beloved by Libyans and has become something of a martyr for law and order. Clearly Stevens did not die in vain. His sacrifice may have accomplished more for the future of Libya than Romney’s proposed two trillion-dollar increase in military spending ever could.”
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