Week 2 - Initial Toughts about the Course

I think the biggest struggle I have with technology is explaining it to other people and convincing them to use it. I teach at Granite Hill School in Newport, New Hampshire. It is a small school for students with special behavioral needs. This past September, I convinced my principal that we should begin using Google Calendar so we can keep everyone up to date. She liked the idea but getting people to actually use it is not easy. I gave all staff a quick training at the beginning of the semester but it was not enough. I think getting people (especially educators and other professionals who are used to doing things one way) to really appreciate and utilize new technologies takes a sustained effort.

I hope as we learn new tools in this course, we also learn how to make them useful to our colleagues who are not taking Computer Education courses and do not have the time for substantial amounts of training. I have been considering using Jing to make some tutorials for my co-workers to view, but I'm not sure it would be enough. I think as schools embrace technology and make it ubiquitous, they will need to provide ongoing professional development to help teachers use the technology. My school is small; we do not have a technology coordinator. I teach ICT, Economics, Wood Shop, I am the Safety Coordinator, and I teach a night school class as well. I would love to spend more time working with other staff to incorporate technology into their classes, but this is not something that is presently feasible.

Currently, my digital footprint is limited. I do have a website, but only for the classes I teach. I use it for lesson plans sometimes. If I am working with the students in the computer lab, I will put my lesson plan into a blog on the site with links to Google documents or other websites for each activity. This helps a lot with the flow of the lesson. I have a couple of videos on YouTube but only for academic reasons. One video I created for I presentation I gave in Theories of Learning and Cognitive Development last year. The other two are videos of three-dimensional models I made using Google SketchUp; I posted them to my class website as samples to share with my students, some of whom use SketchUp in my classes. Finally, I recently started contributing a little to a few forums, mostly ubuntuforums because it is an extremely helpful resource for people like me who are new to Ubuntu.

If you are wondering, Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution. It is a completely open source alternative to Windows or Mac. It is free, powerful, and growing. I highly recommend checking it out. I used it in a virtual machine (Vbox) on my Macbook for about a month before deciding to buy a System76 Starling netbook, which comes with Ubuntu. I love it! I now use the netbook as my primary computer. I am sure I will end up blogging more about Ubuntu, but I think I will wait until we get into discussing open source software later on. For now, let me share my KWL (minus the L):