Ahhhh, the school year is rolling and it's been so busy! This summer I coordinated my second CUE conference at Tahquitz High School. It was so amazing I must say so myself! We had a Star Wars theme, "May the Force Be With You" and I saw many Jedi become Master Jedi. I am truly excited how many more teachers are excited to move forward to upgrade their instruction and incorporate technology alongside books and lecture. We are now eight weeks into our new year and teachers are pulling me into their rooms to get help and show me what they are doing. The utter sheer pride in their work is growing--though I've tried to harness many resisters for years, finally, some of those holdouts are joining us, and with smiles on their faces. Like a proud mama I am.
I reflect back at our school site, and at education and rightly, we are moving strong in the right direction. Technology has taken over so many hours of our lives, personal and professional. All teachers need to integrate technology into their instruction for this is the world our students live in. I now have students in my classes who have seemingly only know the 21st Century tech age. Equally amazingly, I have students who come into my room each year and they can't type and they can't use a computer. (Smartphones, yes!) This is the new literacy test! Digital literacy. Are they aware of the digital footprint? Can they navigate the web for content? Can they interact and use the web as a tool for their work and passions? Social media, while I love it, is a distraction to our young people as well. As much as we may try to incorporating the skills from social media to our school work sometimes, it will only be a small part. I encourage all of us to look at how we can utilize technology, both the hardware and software. There is so much out there, one can hardly keep up.
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Technology has moved into our hands and it is here to stay! A few years ago, a smartphone was a luxury item and not everyone had them. Students maybe had a flip phone. Now, we are coming into a time where more and more students have smartphones, and they are getting younger and younger.
As a mom of three, I can distinctly recall discussing at what age I would deem a phone appropriate--that was age 10, for only my oldest, so that when they went to visit their dad I would have contact with them. I bought minutes to load on the phone, and we only used it when they went away. Slowly, but yet quickly, the digital world came upon us. Now, all three of my children have phones, although one can only use hers on wifi. The phone serves as their access to their friends, family, as a dictionary and calculator and computer for tasks we'd previously go to desktop for. As a teacher, most of my students have a smartphone. It is becoming a number one distraction too, a challenge for teachers all over the world, as my research shows. Is it possible for kids, people, to become addicted to their phones? I think so. I'm going to leave these thoughts here for now. The pros and cons for technology are many. How will we all be changed by technology. My title started as a title, but I suppose it ends as a question. On August 6, 2015, we held our first CUE conference here at Tahquitz High School, the first in the Hemet Unified School District). Our sessions supported each other with what we knew we needed a long time ago. We asked to be given the opportunity to make it happen, and wow, the results are spectacular!
In the past two weeks, many of my colleagues have shared with me that they are starting or expanding websites, beginning Google Classrooms and seeing all that Google has online for educators. Staff collaborating with each other integrating tech and tweaking how they plan to deliver content this year--this made for a different beginning of year conversation at Tuesday's staff meeting. Emails read with that Tahquitz PRIDE and I've been invited to help a couple people after school, on text and phone calls walking them through things, and yes, a couple hours on Saturday! Today, in my mailbox, I saw the CTE class had a new flyer trying to gear the class towards including more girls, clearly evident with ideas from gleaned from our conference to access a population he's been trying to encourage for years! How exciting it really is to see people seeing the potential in their curriculum and overall, there seems to be an obvious inflamed passion for the craft and an eagerness to connect with students. At our conference opening, I introduced Sugata Mitra and his research about children driving their own education (Child Driven Education, Ted Talk). Kids want to learn and if we "guide on the side" with well prepared curriculum that provides students access to the tools and resources we want them to use; learning will happen. Technology is only going to become more and more fluid to students and we clearly need to see potentially how we can each tweak what we do right now to how we can do it in the future. Remember what I said about those Amazon reviews for ipad cases, "I realized later that those reviews showed me how many people were giving ipad to two and three year-olds! Education will have to look different! The children will demand it!" Well, I'm glad that our administration agreed with me and provided us a teacher day to hold our conference and I'm so glad that some of my co-workers responded to my request to build a CUE team here at Tahquitz!! Thank you to the admin for their support and excitement, to my CUE team for their time and effort, and for all the attendees who were gracious and studious! |
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