Will It Work?

The Internet Study Module (ISM) that has consumed so much of my life the last few weeks has finally been posted to the school website. I sent advance copies (doesn't that sound grand?) to the district admin, hoping it will be what they are looking for, but I'll confess to being very nervous.

Not nervous about the admin. If they don't care for what they find, we'll pull it and start over (or replace the new with the previous learning module). What I'm nervous about is the reactions of my fellow teachers. Have I pushed too hard? Am I asking them to take too big a leap? Is this just going to frustrate people who are working as hard as they can to prepare the young minds that are entrusted to us?

Then I read David Warlick's post, "Caught Whining..." and breathed a sigh of (almost) relief.

I do not believe that most teachers are too far behind to start learning new tools. They’re smart, resourceful, dedicated, and they are professional learners.That's the community in which I work...a family of professional learners.

Am I pushing too hard, too fast? Perhaps. But I'll find out shortly, once word spreads that the module is out there, ready to be worked on.

Highs and Lows of Tech

Having recovered from my elation about being able to blog from my cell phone, I asked DH to work through the ISM again.

We are all so accustomed to learning being packaged, either in a text book or in a handout, that shifting to reading/writing directly on a web page can be a little confusing. A "little"??? More like a LOT.

I use the Internet much like nlowell. It is something that I use constantly, in a myriad of ways. Getting ready for a family trip to Mexico, my son was startled to discover that I had gotten a much better exchange rate on dollars to pesos than he had, simply by going through my bank's online service. He had made many phone calls, driven quite a distance, I had spent fifteen minutes online and beaten his results. My response? "If I can't do it online, I probably won't do it.

On my way to finding nlowell's statement, I ran across this timely posting by Teacher K. Is screen-casting the answer?

Those of you who are working your way through the ISM module need to help me on this one. Is it pushing you too far out of your Zone of Proximal Development to have the entire module as only online? Would you, the consumers of the product, prefer to have a physical handout to work with? I'm so accustomed to doing everything on the computer, including taking notes and adding comments to documents, that I may be pushing too much of my own learning style on you.

Leave me a comment and let me know!

New test

Test

Goodness Gracious! What won't they think of next?

Trying to think my way through the section on Social Networking (specifically the entry for blogging), I wandered around the Help sections at blogger.com, where this blog is posted. Lo and behold I can now blog from my cell phone! The picture is not the best in the world - I guess I didn't really expect it to work - but I'm not going to redo it. Instead, I'm going to revel in the silliness of my first experiment with moblogging. What an incredible tool this could be in the classroom!