Techlearning blog

How about my friends Maria Knee and Kathy Shields who both teach kindergarten, suppose we took the technology away from their classrooms for a for week, who would be affected most? First of all, Maria would not be able to post her student question of the week. Then I am sure she would hear from the grandparents and parents who would normally check in to watch what had happened during the day or week. Kathy would not be able to check her voice thread for additional comments from around the world. Would these ladies still be able to teach our youngest learners? Absolutely! These students would still be immersed in literacy and numeracy. They would still hold onto books, write stories with pencil , crayons and paper, still count, add and group items all the while looking for patterns in their environment. But.... you are saying would they be as engaged? would the students be satisfied with their audience on their refrigerator rather than their blog?

How about my friend Vicki Davis who is immersed in the Horizon Project with students from around the world? Can you image her going into class and saying no internet for the week, no technology for the week, no using skype to talk to anyone outside of the classroom, never mind making a connection to another time zone? How claustrophobic it is beginning to feel? Would Vicki still be able to teach her students for that week without interactive and collaborative technology? Of course, but how pertinent, effective and relative would the information be? If her students were working on making connections and a compare/contrast activity about the Atlanta Summer Olympics and the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics . Are you beginning to make your own conclusions? All the current upheaval in Tibet is happening in real time. The world is not to going to wait for any of us to get with the technology. Tibet will be history in just 5 days, never mind a week. What happens in Tibet will affect the Olympics. How will it affect you?

Finally, how about my friends who are tech integrators, if they experience a week without technology imagine what Bob Sprankle, Alice Barr and Kern Kelley would do? When Bob loses the Internet connection during his lessons he always has a back up plan to use a program that exists on the workstations. If he lost power to the computer lab, being the great teacher that he is, it would become an opportunity to discuss alternatives. For example, I imagine that Bob would instantly have a lesson about Internet safety or cyberethics. However, it wouldn't be long before those students would be missing significant skills.

Finally, my friends Alice and Kern. Last week I had the good fortune to interview them and their students on a Tuesday evening at Women of Web 2.0 and addressed them as the maine connection. (If I had a week w/out technology, I would not be able to webcast our wow2 show. I would seriously slide backwards in my knowledge about what technology is and does today.) Back to the show, Alice and Kern are both technology integrators in Maine schools. They both provide opportunities for their students to continue to expand their horizons using technology. Well after interviewing Alice and Kern about their jobs, we brought in the students using SKYPE. Now many adults have never used SKYPE before, but these students knew it was my preference to connect to them using SKYPE. They had the most unique SKYPE user names, they were online ahead of time, checking their sound and chatting with their teacher to get things all squared away. I was so impressed. No one, NO ONE, taught them about SKYPE. They figured it out!

We, the Women of Web 2.0, Jen Wagner, Sharon Peters, Vicki Davis and I, asked them to talk about their technology experiences. What is unique is that these students all grew up with the 1-1 laptops in grade 7 and 8 as part of the State of Maine MLTI program. Then one town continued with HS 1-1 laptops, the other continued with laptops on carts, but the inherent message from their schools, we can't shut off the technology!

This post was written during a lay over at Chicago O'Hare Airport on my XO laptop!

Here are two bloggers you should take a peek at. Linda Eller
and Carl Anderson. Both of these bloggers posted comments to my post 2 weeks ago. Expand your horizon and read someone new. A huge thanks to Carl for persevering when his comments didn't show up here at TechLearning.com, he just posted to his blog. Keep trying!