Create it!

I must say that while this quarter's technology requirements feel daunting, the tools I will use and skills I will develop feel more practical to me than last quarter's tasks. Now, I loved Photostory and did appreciate learning how, in the most basic sense, to develop a Web site through Weebly. But I feel like I can see the natural uses and applications in the classroom and beyond for, for example, Google docs, Glogster, and the various comic-strip tools. Not all my students have the ability to listen to a Podcast, but learning how to record one, empirically speaking, is not a useless skill. Same with Skype: I haven't yet learned how to Skype, but clearly, that's a tool that transcends education. I want to learn what we're learning this quarter, and I'm challenging myself to develop an electronic portfolio, and I'm starting by putting my weekly planner/schedule in Google calendars and my lesson plans in Google docs. I'm in Beta testing mode at this point, but hopefully within the next month I will be prepared to go live, as they say.

I also appreciated the Lehman video and the "new" Bloom's Taxonomy. I read the latter as I was preparing to make my first foray into Google docs--before I'd given much thought to what I would do with it--and it planted the seeds of a minor epiphany. "Creating," though not a new skill, does have an added importance, with inherently greater meaning, in today's society. I come from a creative profession, but I hadn't really put in perspective the technological skills involved in creating, and how those skills are going to be embedded, if they aren't already, in today's students. The new verbs (highlighted in blue) on the Bloom's diagram are telling: "bookmarking" under "remembering," "linking" under "analyzing," and "blogging" and "podcasting" under "creating," to name a few. I may not embrace all aspects of technology or adopt them in my personal life, but this article certainly made me think about the necessity for doing so in education.