What I am looking into and thinking about at the end of this first week:
- BYOD, one to one, how does it work? is it a good idea? as a solution to access problems within the school. Who is doing it? who is doing is near me?
- District policy: what is it? who is creating it? how is it being implemented in the district?
- Finding out who is doing what in my district with ICT
- Finding/making connections with people who share interests and are working on the things I am working on
- Learning how to organize my own digital intercations and how to help students be organized. Can I use my own personal blog (which I just started this week so that I will share my practice not merely share separately and solely for each of my individual UBC courses)
- Pursuing particular resources ie mindmeister, blogger, wordpress, wordle, popplet, pearltree, and so on
- Learning how to use this application to do what I want with my blog posts (arg photos and using the iPad are proving to be challenges so far)
- Creating developing and expanding my PLN, and learning how to talk to strangers, or even people I already know but do not normally engage in these ways.
I find that my mind is very overwhelmed after each of these classes and I am having trouble holding on to all of my thoughts about things so the above list is merely a fraction of the things that have occurred to me during the last 4 days.
What I have done as of 2:25 of Friday afternoon:
- all the blog posts and all that that we are required of course.
- started a new Blogger Blog for myself Adventures in Reading, Learning, and Teaching (which I chose because I have Google and I had already created a course blog for LIBE 465 using it)
- in order to get a grasp on my ‘Connected Self’ I have started a list on my blog of links to all of my content on the web including my Showme Account, Prezis, my other course projects blogs, wikis…that is all I can think of at the moment.
- I was able to capture all the blogs I had been following from my Google Reader! ( just in time too 🙁 )
- started a Pearltree to represent my own learning on started to collect some materials on some of the topics above
- started a popplet can’t get the popples to move and they are all stacked on top of one another got mad and closed the window… I’ll go back to it later
- I have come to sit in the Chapman Library Commons to contemplate what it is all about.
- decided to stop at 449
A standing ovation to you Merrin! What a lot of work you have done. And what’s better, you have reflected on this work, sorted out in your mind what works and doesn’t work for you, and put it all away at 5 on a Friday afternoon ( as everyone should).
I perused your blog and was happy to discover that I could see the pictures you had talked about and that didn’t want to show up during your presentation. Yay! I was curious about that interesting project.
While you’ve got a little sad face in your blog post at one point, it is clear that you have come so far on your journey of creating a connected self and being a valuable teacher and learner of technology. Your growth is evident – especially through your presentation yesterday. And you’ve brought up some very important and relevant points. In some places, BYOD would work just fine, in others it is bound to cause troubles.
Thanks again Merrin for your thoughtful contribution. As we were at about the same point in the technology lineup that first day, you give me hope as to the lengths that my learning may reach as we’ll.
Not to worry about the sad face that was only in relation to Google’s decision to discontinue Google reader which I was a big fan of for keeping blog postings organized. I still haven’t found an ideal alternative though I’m trying to come up with some iPad solutions for that.
Thank you for your support, it is good to know that we’re all in the same boat isn’t it.
Using Twitter I found that some of my colleagues at my old school are planning tobecome a ‘digital classroom’. I still have to work out what they mean by that as I don’t know if they’re planning BYOD but I’m curious to look more into the troubles that might be caused by BYOB aside from the obvious ‘the kid won’t stop playing games and do his work problem’.
Hi Merrin,
Your post is very mindful! The questions you bring up are some that I too am pondering. I find ICT in the classroom is a ‘touchy’ subject with some educators. Some are all for ICT, while on the other hand some ignore it. It’s important for educators and TLs (Teacher Librarians) to understand the pros and cons of ICT. Of course we don’t want our students to have too much screen time; ICT in the classroom should be used to enhance students learning.
You raise the question of BYOD “how does it work and is it a good idea?”
In my opinion BYOD is a fabulous idea. Students need to have expectations and guidelines of when they could use their devices. There is always the issue of theft, but that could be prevented.
I think you should be quite proud of yourself as you are engaging and familiarizing yourself with many different digital medias and relate them to your profession.
With ICT we are able to connect with people on the other side of the world. A class could have a pen pal class in India, where both classes e-mail or tweet each other. Students are able to see current events taking place. Teachers are able to use technology as a ‘hook’ (to attain students attention on a particular subject matter).
I think the next 5 years we will see a big shift in how we teach. There will be teachers that embrace technology and those who won’t, some may even think that technology is amoral. I think we need to keep students learning in the forefront of discussion and cater to their needs and enhancement 🙂
A great job synthesizing your experiences from week 1. Perhaps, part of what we are dealing with is developing the skills to handle multiple levels of change, including how we, as educators and librarians, process the dynamic contextual conditions that arise when digital technologies meet education. It would be wonderful if you are interested in pursuing inquiry into the movement to switch from providing computer labs in schools and having everyone BYOD. In terms of policy, it would be great to have teachers provide informed input into policy development to ensure things like FOIPPA, school networks, student access to ICT devices, are all covered in the BYOD initiative.