Greetings and "What we Waste"
I am honored to be posting the first official entry of the new TechLearning Weblog. As you'll notice, the T&L Blogorati have been practicing over the past week, stirring up some controversial ideas, at the request of the magazine. So read on down, the postings of Wes Fryer (Lubbock), Miguel Guhlin (San Antonio), Terry Freedman (London), David Jakes (Suburban Chicago), and myself (Raleigh).
I had planned to continue with something hyper-provocative today, but instead, I want to report on a singular event that I experienced last week. Return next week to be rocked.
On Friday, I spoke at the returning education strand of last week's MacWorld, in San Francisco. Mike Lawrence, the executive director of California's Computer Using Educators (CUE), put together a hum-dinger of a show (That's North Carolina-speak for a super event).
I started things off with a keynote. It was my usual telling the new story, intermixed with some it isn't the technology, but it's the information that' changing, and we need to redefine literacy to reflect the new nature of information..... Hall Davidson followed with a high-energy demonstration of his KitZu project, and how even the less tech-savvy of educators can make compelling video. I did two more sessions during the day on podcasting and blogging, but the real jewels were two presenters I had not heard of before -- but will certainly be hearing again.
Initially, the description of Carol Anne McGuire's presentation on assistive technologies did not inspire me with anticipation. I could very easily have spent that time making one more visit to the exhibit floor. But I was tired. Jet-lag had set in like a brick, and I sat and watched -- absolutely mesmerized. A quintessential elementary school teacher, McGuire mixed her demonstrations of the built-in accessibility features of the Macintosh, with examples of her students' work (most of them are completely blind), including a compelling video that the entire class produced. Yes, blind students can make video.
For most of that presentation my jaw was near the floor, especially while watching a completely blind second grader deliver a video tutorial about some fairly advanced features of the Macintosh's Universal Access control panel. Rather than learning how technology helped handicapped students to compensate, I watched as these unfortunate children had become truly special, contributing brilliantly to their communities.
Rae Niles, the director of curriculum and technology for the 1:1 Sedgwick Public Schools of Kansas, started her presentation with a story of how one of their classes was studying handicaps, emphasizing blindness. Since no blind people lived in their small town, the study was purely academic until Niles, who knew of Carol Anne McGuires class, e-mailed her and arranged an iChat session between the two classes. The students in Kansas enjoyed an extended virtual visit with the class of severely sight-impaired or completely blind children in Los Angeles, learning that these children actually see advantages to living with blindness.
Niles, a consummate story teller, continued by describing two disenfranchised boys, who had struggled for years with learning disabilities and socialization issues. She told the story of how each of these students, when given a laptop computer as a learning tool, had emerged with astounding talents, completely unnoticed and undeveloped by traditional classrooms.
Again, I was blown away by what learners accomplish when they have personal access to computers, contemporary tools that are an essential part of nearly every other endeavor of our society -- outside the classroom. With contemporary information and communication technologies, talent and value can be found that once hid behind handicaps, and in students who once hid themselves in the back rows of our classrooms.
...and this is the cost of not investing in every classroom and every learner with the technologies that are the pen and paper of our time.
This is a story we need to go out and tell,
that the cost of investing in education is not the point.
It's the devastating cost of not investing that we will be paying,
for many many years!
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A musical about the witches from The Wizard of Oz breaks West End box office records, its producers say...
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