Thanks to Angela Maiers, I found a great piece about teachers not using technology.  It’s an opinion piece by Tim Holt entitled The Rise of the Digital Refusenik. The piece starts by paraphrasing Marc Prensky’s concepts of Digital Native and Digital Immigrant. He maintains that most teachers who would be classified as immigrants have either quit teaching or retired and the majority of working teachers started their teaching careers after the introduction of computers in the schools. It’s a well thought out argument and I have seen several refuseniks of my own.

Most of them, in my experience, want to run before they can walk. The want to do all the fancy stuff that they see others doing but don’t want to put in the time to understand how it all works or learn the basics of computer operation and maintenance. My analogy is the kid who wants to show up at the game and start without putting in the time at practice with the team. There is a certain amount of background work that has to be done and fully understood before you get to the really fun stuff. It drives me crazy when someone says they don’t know where a file was saved AND they have no idea how to find out where it is. How can anyone not know where something was printed AND have no idea how to find out other than to walk to each printer and look?

My biggest issue is time. Where do people find the time to read all the blogs and check all the sites that are interesting? I have a huge list of blogs, publications, and books that I’d like to read. I wish I had time to check a lot of websites on a daily, or even weekly basis but it’s just not possible even if I gave up other activities that I find enjoyable.

At any rate you can review my postings on Emerging Tech Days 1-5 to get my reaction to the various sites/tools that we visited and my plans for using them in the coming year.

The final activity was group presentations. The class was divided into three groups, each of which prepared a unit of instruction on a topic of their choice. Group number one’s topic was Digital Citizenship (this link is to their group wiki on Wetpaint). More information and resources are available at their group website. It was a very good presentation about copyright (including Creative Commons licenses) and netiquette. I will be checking out their resources in the near future as this is another topic we will be discussing in my class this fall. Group number two was my group. Our unit was designed as a professional development unit and is about Authentic Writing. Authentic writing is engaging students (and teachers) in writing to a real audience or writing for a real purpose (as opposed to writing for one teacher to receive a grade). In the unit, teachers will create a blog and a voicethread. We also introduced classroom blogging with 21classes.com. Our participants will reflect on their learning with their personal blog and will create an action plan for implementation of these tools in their classroom. The action plan will be posted on a wiki created for these sessions. Group number three presented Ning. Ning is a social networking tool you can use to set up a personal network. There are many privacy settings and their plan was to set up a social network for a school that is only accessible by people that the site administrator approves. I like this idea and am thinking about a site for staff at my school. It could be another way for teachers to keep up with what their peers are doing for and with students.

We also explored Podcasting and created a podcast for our final project. I have read a great deal about creating podcasts, but have never actually created one so this was very interesting and practical. My Advanced Computer Apps class will be creating a weekly school newscast via podcasts so it was a good idea for me to have a dry run. I was also interested to learn the steps necessary to syndicate the podcast. I had planned to post the podcasts on the school website but I hadn’t explored syndication yet.