Thursday, February 5, 2009

Change of Course?

We might be headed in a direction other than that in which we want to head (I think that's grammatically correct....no terminal prepositions for me!). The two workshops I've done so far (though my sample size is only five people...) have indicated to me that we need to start off at a more basic level. We see a lot of these cool techie tricks as very exciting and useful. Many teachers, though, could perceive them as threatening to their current methods, too complicated, etc. We need to couch this entire tech day in more gentle, "non-threatening" language just like Chad said. I'm going to admit -- I'm more than a little bit frightened about what the general reaction to this 1/2 day of technology is going to be. We're going to have to be very careful, but at the same time, echo the sentiments of that loverly post by Andy. Arrggg... thoughts?

2 comments:

Paul Wiech said...

I have to agree with David in that it seems people are overwhelmed by the wealth of information we are attempting to share. I have presented to one department and they like all the technology but would need to learn one thing at a time to make something like Google Docs work for them. I guess we are forgetting our education background and possibly need to do some scaffolding of technology so we can get more people on board.

Barb said...

I know. It's 9/09 and I'm just commenting. But, you are so right.

I love all this stuff, like today Paul directed me to his tutorial on how to sign up to do a course. Great.

People will only do and learn as they can assimilate it into the classroom.

I'm thinking the more tutorials you put out and then invite specific people to view it who might be able to use it in their classrooms with help from you--that might be good. Am I making sense? Call if you want more.

Your computer beginner, Barb