Pushing the Envelope...again

Being cutting edge is attached to a lot of anxiety-making behaviour.  Tomorrow I stand in front of my peers presenting my views on strategies for getting your staff to engage students thru technology.  People are constantly surprised that this is what a teacher-librarian does. This is what I'm presenting:

Adventures in leadership thru technology

Also this week I wrote a Guest Blog on the Canadian Education Association website.

My good friend D was over and I was wowing him with my new toy the Livescribe Pen.  It's a pen, that makes a video recording of what you write, and an audio recording of what you say.  For people like me, who work really really hard to stay on top of the datasphere and emerging technologies, the Livescribe is a lovely way to enjoy the act of writing, and still digitize what I say.  I come up with new ways to use it in the classroom all the time.  This short 1 minute video is a Pencast (Livescribe recording) of what first popped into D's head when he saw it working.

Pencast Pluses with D

So what does it make you think of?

I wish this for my child

My son has been in formalized day care and school since he was 2 1/2. He was already reading then.  He came home the last week of school this year at the end of grade 1 and said "I hate reading".  I wish that he could direct his own learning, and choose to produce really great work.  The trick is that he'd be required to develop a relationship with a really great teacher who could adjust to his needs and to the needs of his classmates on a daily basis.  I wonder if we truly implemented the vision statement "that it takes a village to raise a child" if we couldn't pull this off.

Working in the library, I feel like I'm individually guiding the needs of every student and every teacher on a daily, minute-to-minute basis.  Why couldn't all the teachers of one grade collaborate on 8 projects that would hit all the curriculum outcomes for each student?  I absolutely loved the idea for the project where students are designing, building and then donating toys.  Phenomenal....hits the creative arts, math, science, social science and has real-world implications.  And its safe.  And I bet when those students see the impact they have that they'll be motivated to do it all over again for a new project.  It takes a huge amount of risk-taking to try this, but I think, if we don't that we, as teachers, could be obsolete sooner than later.