Healing Bruises

My bruise from the fall over the bench is almost all healed! yippee!
I am currently at the National Harbor in MD just on the other side of the Potomac from Alexandria. I had a great day today working as a volunteer in Registration. I met people from all across the country as I blabbered my way through explaining where to find things and how to correct the typos on their tickets. I'm looking forward to the week and getting to hear a few new things and get the gears rolling forward (instead of backwards?!)
I'll update more tomorrow :)

How do you define wisdom?

I spotted this one through David Warlick's blog. I peek in on his musings every now and again :)
There was this link to this video and information about a book. It's a 5 minute or less collection of thoughts on wisdom from some of the influential individuals from the older generation.
It is worth your five minutes to give it a watch.

How do you define wisdom? How do we impart that upon our students?

A good dose of humility

I was reminded while reading Maya Angelou's new book, Letter to My Daughter, that a healthy dose of humility is in order in my life.
I fell clean head over feet first today onto a bench as I was walking in one direction and fussing at kids in another. Smash! I now have big bruises on my legs and a few scrapes and an achy knee to show for my Monday. I should have kept my mouth shut and allowed the person trying to take care of it to handle it...
Humility.

Our wireless is not doing what it should be. I am taking it in stride. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. I just have to remember that we are growing, shaping, moving in sort of an amoebus blob...it's not all going to go smoothly and I don't know best all of the time.

And lastly, humility again...I can't do it all. I am juggling a few too many things as a result of my interest and excitement rather than my realistic energy and ability to follow through. I am back to basics with trying to play catch up and not appear worse the wear for it. It is tough. Teaching can be like that I guess but today did not give me many opportunities for reflection and growth. It was more like eating a ridiculously large bowl of pudding, tiny spoonful by tiny spoonful until you're full and then over-filled and yet still eating. I'm just realizing how much I've taken on and I'm overwhelmed. So the humble me is stepping back and taking account. Tomorrow I have to make a list and get to work on getting through it. And I have to watch where I'm walking and let people help me when they are able so I don't go flying over any more benches.
Ouch.

Virtual Field Trips

We're just getting started in Spotsy with distance learning. The definition to distance learning can include many of the things we have in place in Spotsylvania, but there isn't really a definition in place yet. It's hard to say where we're headed with distance learning but we will definitely be participating in some virtual field trips. Even virtual field trips can include different types of interactions with content. It might be that there is a guide or docent in a video conference at the actual location you or your class is visiting. Virtual field trips might also be more like webquests or web journeys where the student or class is interacting with content and video and/or photos of a location.

It's fun to see the individual reactions to the equipment. We are using Tandberg's video conferencing equipment for video conferencing. As people contact me or other locations to test their audio and video, there is a childlike glee as we see each other in the image and can hear each other across the distance. If we can retain the glee and combine it with some hard work and creativity, we will have a winning initiative in Spotsylvania County. Please share resources as you find them...

an Education in Communication

Work and life are so inextricably linked. I definitely appreciate the convenience that technology offers. I think that the benefits outweigh the detriments when it comes to enhancing communication. We have come up with solutions for communicating announcements, newsletters, emergencies, grades, assignments, etc...to our students and parents. I think with every new development comes the need for a re-evaluation of communication. We should be evaluating whether we are depending so much on the new tool that we are forgetting how effective human contact truly is.

Case in point (referring to my first sentence), I'm trying to finance the purchase of my husband's car. I had the option of applying online with the promise of a 24 hour response. 96 hours later, no response. I finally contacted them through a site they provide for tracking the status and then 24 hours from then, I had a response that they tried to contact me and left a message "to no avail". To no avail?!? Talk about NO MESSAGE on any of my three numbers,no email in my inbox, no follow through, no help. And they cancelled the application. Now I have to call THEM. The supposed convenience of applying online left me with more questions than answers and there was no easy way to get my questions answered. It's a case of poor communication and ineffective follow-through.

As educators, we have to be aware that even though the convenience is there, sometimes the best thing to do is check on the customer and make sure that everything is working splendidly from their point of view. Hurray for progress but don't forget the customer and that sometimes we need the human contact.

Lonely Nights in Education

I'm sitting in our computer lab waiting for parents that aren't coming. I'm supposed to be sharing our online parent resource and our online course management system as part of our curriculum kick-off. It's sort of an SOL kick off, but we don't use the anachronym SOL anymore ;).

I don't blame them. There aren't that many of them to start with. Part of the issue is lack of involvement. Don't get me wrong, we love that there are probably 25-40 parents with their kids here tonight. Awesome. But what about the others?

But necessity is the mother of invention, or so I've been told. I need parents, I need communication, therefore I need something different. I think that for the next night (which would be a parent conference night) we should do something related to internet literacy. I'd also like to get the kids involved somehow. It's all doable...but it doesn't make the next fifty minutes of my life any less lonely or any more enjoyable!

Education Makes me Tired

My job from day to day could include everything from showing a teacher that the reason their monitor doesn't work is because their monitor isn't plugged in to deciding whether or not a site visit should include one, two or more representatives and how to best broach that with my potential host...It can be exhausting. What can sometimes be deceiving about what I do is that it does sometimes require sitting at my desk. I spent a few hours today on a newsletter and on a distance learning initiative. I had an online meeting using Communicator where it may have looked like I was talking to myself to the average passerby. Work (thankfully) requires that I be out and about but on days like this I struggle with understanding why I'm so tired after spending so much time in one place.

It's a different kind of teaching in what we do as ITRTs and it requires planning, just as planning in the classroom does. But today I felt the zeal start to seep back into my fingertips. I was multi-tasking and keeping it all together. I managed to finish a few things I set out to finish and I created goals to finish other items in the next few days ahead of me. It is a lot like being a classroom teacher, there are just different types of items to juggle.

I also have to apologize for the blatant sarcasm in the previous post. I felt it, I meant it and please note that I did include Education in the title of this post. Oh-somebody called me a socialist today for my political tendencies...hmph. I wonder if they'll still want help with their SMART Board tomorrow? :) LOL