Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

Hey gang.

I generally stay away from personal, and politcial issues, but this one hits close to home. 

I just wanted to take a minute and ask you to think about the immigration reform day today.  As you may know, there is a general strike planned to support sensible immigration reform.

Dagmara (my wife) is Polish.  Many of her friends and their friends come to the states during the summer to make some extra money and support our seasonal economy. 

I respectfully ask that you show solidarity today by refraining from buying anything.  I know it’s kind of a big thing to ask, but putting a bunch of cops and sending all the illegal immigrants home isn’t going to fix anything - we need sensible immigration reform, so these people can come to America and work, make a better life for themselves, and help our economy.  It truly is a win-win situation. 

If the Republican Right get’s their way, we won’t enjoy these seasonal workers.  We won’t be able to help people make a truly better life for themselves.  We won’t be able to support our seasonal economy. 

Aren’t we more than this reasonless, reactionary,fear-based thinking?  Isn’t the United States better than this?

Thanks.

Bill

When I was presenting in New York, a person nervously asked “if I put everything online, what am I going to teach?”

Heh. Good question.

What would I teach if I didn’t have to teach basic facts or concepts?  What would my classroom look like if my students had already reviewed my lecture notes or the lesson?  If they had already listened to podcasts, reviewed the class wiki, and read the notes from previous classes?  What would my teaching look like?

I’d say I would be doing what I love; challenging kids to really think.  If we understood the basics of the civil right movement, we could begin to debate the similarities and differences between civil rights of the 60’s and the illegal immigration movement today.  Students would be able to engage in a higher-level discourse. Classtime would be spent communicating rather than lecturing. Students would come into the class already knowing basic facts and concepts.

The prospect for many teachers is positively terrifying.  Giving up control, giving up power, and becoming a facilitator.  At a recent talk by Hall Davidson, he stated that attendance rates dropped in basic and survey-level courses. 

This question, I think, moves the very heart of adopting new technologies in the classroom; teachers are afraid of change, afraid of change, afraid of change.

As my friend Walter McKenzie is apt to say “you have to let go of the old ways”. 

I’ll fix your printer and tell you about new technology.

This falls under the “whatever it takes” school of technology integration.  Teachers are often strapped for time, poorly trained for technology, and often struggle to understand how technology can work.

So when we are called into a classroom to fix an annoying technology problem, we have a temporary open door.  The teacher is focused and energized on technology.  Despite the feelings might be negative, once we have fixed the problem, we have an opportunity to introduce a new idea.

Without belaboring the point, this is also why IT IS SO IMPORTANT YOUR TECH SUPPORT PEOPLE ARE NICE.  Teachers often seek the “teachable moment” As instructional technology coordinators, we need to also find the “teachable moments” for our teachers.  When teachers encounter a mean-spirited technical support person (or a very lazy one), it does nothing but hinder, hamper, impede, and obstruct successful use of technology in your school. 

David McDivitt has some very interesting initial statistics from his world history class.

David is a results-focused educator, and his voice is valuable in the games in education space.

Leave it to good ole technorati to come up with some fantastic statistics for their regular state of the blogosphere!

From the post…

# Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
# The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
# It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
# On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
# 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
# Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Hi folks!

On holiday for the next week, so posts might be few and far between. 

Warmly,

Bill