Notes from a technidiot

Okay, so here I am at the technology in education conference. It is in Copper Mountain which is stinkin pretty. I am sitting outdoors, watching the rock climbers on the climbing tower. There is this little kid starting up. He is a little spider-man, climbing climbing. He stops, shaking, holding onto the rope, saying "I'm done, I wanna come down." But the guides are great, they hear him, they give a tip, "there's a great handhold to your right," and the kid finds the wall again and keeps on climbing.

I feel the same about technology in the classroom. I thought when I played Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand on my dad's old Apple IIe in the 80's (with 5" floppy disks, MENU and RUN GO) I was more technology-savvy than most of my friends at the time. But technology got away from me somehow. I lost my edge. Suddenly there were gadgets, devices and software that I had never heard of. It all is supposed to increase efficiency in the classroom, but how would I know that? We don't even have formal training in my school for the gadgets that we do have. And as a teacher I am not too keen on adding more job descriptors to my title.

Then I remember that great routine by Louis CK. If you haven't seen it, or don't know what I am talking about, you can look at it here. Everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Teaching is an amazing place to be right now and I want to embrace the good stuff. I came up with a few plans to implement next year; a wiki for my class, keeping up with my moodle, doing online weekly writing prompts, podcasting students' commentaries. There is a lot to do and I think the best way to tackle it is one step at a time. I want to believe in the amazing, not be embittered by the unfamiliar.