Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Tech

  • don’t forget the human connection

    Dennis Harter writes:

    We concern ourselves with the big goals and forget the small goals. We don’t have, often enough, the conversations that allow students to connect with us and us with them. The conversations that show how much we value them and their thoughts.

    I commented on this in the original post, but I feel the need to repeat myself here. It is  something I want to remember as often as possible. It reminds me of a quote I like to cite…I have no clue who first said or wrote it :)

    They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

    I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit these past few weeks.

    A little while ago I was teaching my students some nifty new trick for their blog writing – like embedding media or something like that. One of my students was really not into it and I had to hover and nag for him to get even a fraction of his assignment done. As the bell rang, he hung around until the others left and asked if I would walk him to a new class he was starting the following morning. When I responded that I would he surprised me by spontaneously hugging me! This is a boy in grade 7! At that moment I knew that it was the human connection and not the nifty blogging tricks that was important for that child (and for me, as it touched me deeply.)

    Since then, I’m thinking about how to merge those feelings of security and caring with learning. I think that is the key.

    Thanks for a great post, Dennis. :)

  • 2nd Educational Technology Blog Carnival

    I had never heard of a blog carnival before last week when I read about this one on Scott McLeod’s Dangerously Irrelevant. A blog carnival is a way of culling together blog posts around a shared theme:

    “The goal is to bring the educational blogging community together, to explore themes from a wide variety of starting points, and to respond to one another and refine our ideas. ”
    (from     Gxeremio of Global Citizenship in Virtual World)

    So I decided to submit one of my posts and it has been included in the 2nd Educational Technology Blog Carnival…how fun is that?! :)

    The next blog carnival will be focused around the theme of Access and you can read about how to submit by going to the 2nd edition of the Educational Technology Blog Carnival,where you will also be able to read through the posts that were included in this edition of the carnival.

    I love this idea – it is a fine one!

    Powered by ScribeFire.

  • blogs and wikis: a teacher’s perspective

    Steve Ransom pointed me towards this video of a grade 1 teacher and how she uses blogs and wikis in her classroom. There is also some parent and student commentary. Her advice is to start small, with a blog for your classroom, and let yourself grow with it.

    I’d like to hear her principal’s perspective as well!

    (Oh, and I certainly hope she doesn’t work in this superintendent’s district. If she does she may need to watch out.)

  • “Put technology where it can be best used… In the classroom!”

    [cross ranted as a comment at Stephen Ransom’s EdTechTrek] [and slightly elaborated]

    I am starting to think that because many teachers and administrators
    still do not know exactly what we can do with technology there is a
    reluctance to put it in the classroom.

    Example – today the Internet had, for some reason, stopped working
    in the west wing of our school. I was at the computer lab with one
    other teacher. She packed her kids up and went back because she only
    books the computer lab for the last period of the day so that her kids
    can ‘play on the internet’.

    For her, technology has nothing to do with learning, it is a form of
    entertainment. I stayed with my kids and used the time to work on our
    Science vocabulary while teaching them how to hyperlink in
    presentations. They were linking their vocabulary words to comments and images made by their peers, creating a collaborative learning network around the new terminology they are learning in Science. (Not bad for a wing it activity, eh ;)

    For some reason, this teacher has not caught on yet that technology
    can be much more than a way to waste time. I can understand the frustration of the new teachers that Stephen mentions in his post, but
    until the more experienced teachers and administrators at schools begin
    to use technology as a learning tool, really use it, and demand that
    good forms of it be available in the schools, it isn’t going to happen.

    I can also understand the frustration of the more experienced teachers who are
    expected to use technology but who aren’t really given the time to grow
    less afraid of it and to experiment with what can be done. There is a huge divide between our students who live and breathe with technology as part of their daily lives and the teachers who don’t. Huge. and while
    there are still administrators who don’t use technology in their daily lives and who don’t champion for its appropriate use and availability in the school, let alone the classroom…well…that divide can only be expected to widen.

    Powered by ScribeFire.

  • Preparing the waters for change.

    St Lawrence River
    Image: photo of the St Lawrence River taken by me, available on flickr.

    mrsdurff introduced me to Class 2.0 in a recent comment on Understanding the Machine.

    I love the idea behind this site, and behind different workshops that places like LEARN in Quebec offer teachers.

    How do we negotiate the space between resources on the one hand (PD seminars and workshops, online tutorials, peers, books…) and teachers on the other?

    I asked some of these questions in an earlier post called Creating a Whole Brain Model for Education Reform

    * How can we create a ‘mashup’ of left and right brain tasks and environments that make sense to kids as learners and teachers as educators?
      
    * How can we create professional development experiences that not only teach these ideas but model them as well?   

    * How can we manage the transitions?

    It is that last one that I find so delicate and integral. We can create all kinds of curricula and workshops to share them with teachers, but unless teachers want to learn about them and use them..well, not much will change.

    I think the answer lies in sustained professional development. PD that spends a lot of its time, at first, with teachers in conversation about what is important to them, their values. Time spent rediscovering (for some) and fueling their passion for teaching and looking at how Web 2.0 fits in to all of that.

    When I say sustained I mean not one session at the beginning of the year, but each month throughout the year – throw away the %$#@! monthly staff meetings and replace them with teacher development time, where the community gets together to share, talk, and grow. Invite a student every once in a while to keep us on our toes as well! Make sure parents know what is going on and are involved in learning sessions as well, to keep the school accountable for the change.

    This requires a leader with a strong vision who recognizes the needs of his or her teachers at the same time as the students.

    As you can see, this is something I think about a lot. I have begun the process at one school I work at and we are seeing change in small yet integral areas. It is infectious and exciting. The waters are flowing.

    We will surely be using Class 2.0 with some of the teachers at this school!

    Powered by ScribeFire.