It's the first day of summer vacation and I'm up at 7:00 am to head off to a technology conference. As I sit sipping my morning cup of tea looking out over the Pacific Ocean, I'm wondering what made me sign up for a 2 day conference on the first day of my much needed vacation..... I know - my fascination with technology!
I'm continually amazed by the changes in technology that happen almost daily. Plus I'm constantly trying to figure out how to use these new tools to inspire my students as well as how to help them become the cliche "life-long learners". Clearly in the ever changing world we need to be life long learners. So I headed off to the Kamehameha Schools Ed Tech conference with anticipation.
The day began with a keynote by Will Richardson, an amazing speaker who managed to keep me focused for his 90 minute presentation. He prompted us to think about how to teach our students to make connections to other learners and/or experts on topics of interest by using technology. We've all heard that our students will be working in occupations when they graduate that don't even exist yet so they will need to learn how to teach themselves or find others with whom they can exchange ideas to learn this new job or task. Throughout his presentation he shared numerous books worth reading this summer, sites to check out, and tools to explore. I highly recomemnd checking out his website and his blog, Weblogg-edu for additional information and to add Will to your network of co-teachers/co-learners!
One of my co-workers shared an exciting new on-line application that has the potential to revolutionize how I organize my life. Evernote is this new application! Evernote enables the user to organize information into notebooks that you can easily search. Content comes from the web, photes taken on your iphone or smartphone as well as the more traditional method of simply typing.
I've spent the last few hours exploring and investigating this application. I'm already excited and planning to use it with my web-searching. For now I am using the web-based version only because the Mac version only supports Leopard so I need to wait for my upgrade later this summer. I've easily created several notebooks and clipped several helpful files from the internet.
In addition to organizing my research I can also create public notebooks that I can share with others. What potential will this have for my students. This is the next area of exploration.... more to follow.
As a tech-buff I'm frequently exploring new programs and tools that I can use to "improve" my life. I chat, I text, I jott, and I twitter things many of my colleagues are clueless about but I enjoy them. Staying up to date and knowledgeable about tech enables me to not seem like such a dinosaur to my students. But the one area I've struggled to figure out is why would a classroom teacher want to blog? For that matter why would anyone want to blog? I really do wonder -- what's the point! Why share my ramblings with potentially the world?
