Attending the annual One-to-One computing conference at Penn State this week. This morning’s keynote was un-notable and the first breakout session that I attended (on Web2.0 tools) was basically the same old stuff that we’ve seen again and again and again. So now I’m sitting on the couch in the lobby feeling a little less than thrilled. Reflecting on some things and figured that I might start working out some thoughts here…

I’m beginning to think we are just spinning our wheels for all our talk about the undeniable wealth of valuable teaching tools that are now available to us with nothing more than an internet connection. We give professional development after professional development, attend conference after conference, hold discussion after discussion, and still the migration of new teaching tools into the classroom and the foundational shift in instrucational practice to an energized collaborative authentic learning environment is just soooo painfully slow. Why?

If you ask the general educational audience..it seems to come back to one thing - TIME. But to me that just reaks of lame excuse. We always cry “we don’t have the time” (the time to learn new things, to try new ideas, to experiment, to change), and I think we do that because its such an easy justification for inaction. I know a good number of teachers that seem to have found all the time they need to do such wonderful things in their classroom - integrating new ideas and technologies into every aspect of thier lesson plans. So I think it just comes down to the failure to properly motivate and provide the appropriate incentives to instill these practices, ideas, strategies, paradigms. Its an issue not of time, but of leadership. We need strong leaders to make the delicate and hard and firm and strategic decisions that will ensure our priorities are more substantial than conference-babble. Its a management issue now. We’ve lobbed the grenade into the crowd and the good ideas have stuck to those who are willing. From here on out it comes down to the management wizardry (and the same basic motivational techniques we practiced in our own classrooms) to find out how to reach the reluctant, the scared, the lazy, and the disinterested.

Well…that’s just some random thoughts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Educational Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.