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.

I just recieved my spiffy little Edublogger membership badge from Patricia Donaghy who manages things at the International Edubloggers Directory. I’m proud to be a member, albiet a small fish in a big sea.

Anyhow, in checking out Patricia’s blog, I noticed this interesting post about a facinating online tool called Visuwords. I tell you what, even if you aren’t a word geek this tool will still be interesting to you. Makes more sense if you check it out but the basic premise is this - provide a word, any word….then a beautiful graphic reporesentation of the relationship of that word to other words and phrases dynamically generates within the browser. You can dig into deeper associations by double clicking on subsequent words and word combinations.

At least you’ll learn what a hyponym, hypernym, meronym, and holonym are. Trust me, its much cooler than it sounds.

VISUWORDS

Here’s a couple blog posts I found interesting this week…

Actively Opposing Creativity Fatigue
Six Degrees of Separation in Instant Messaging
Shopping for a Wiki Tool?
Audio Transcript from “The Evolving Federal Role in Education”

I’m beat. Its been a heck of a week. Being out of the district at the end of last week and planning on doing some training in NYC for almost all of next week, I had to cram a BUNCH of stuff in the last couple of days. I needed a break and thought I’d do a quick blog on a couple of things I’ve been meaning to post about.

First, I saw a cool map mash-up project on histroic Route 66. This (and other map mash up projects) would be great to integrate into a social studies/geography class. I found this one very interesting. Even inclues video interviews to create an entire oral history of Route 66. Here’s a useful bookmark list related to mashups where I found this as linked from David Warlick’s blog.

Another recent add to my del.icio.us bookmarks is this nifty little experiment by Carl Anderson, who authors a blog called Techno Constructivist (I love that name…I need a catchy title for my blog…..any suggestions?)

Here’s a free screen capture/recording software that seems to work pretty good. Plain and simple screencasts galore with uTIPu. Check it out.