2 More Blogs To Read

Here are some relatively new blogs I’ve been "Keeping Up" with.  Doug Johnson at The Blue Skunk  blog and Joyce Valenza’s Never Ending Search. 

If you recall, I interviewed Doug back in May and he provided readers with some very (in my opinion) realistic explanations about what it means to be a "technologist" and a librarian in the 21st century. He also threw me a slight "diss" but that’s okay. You’ll have to read the full interview to find it.  

Joyce’s blog had an interesting post the other day on Wikis and "adopting new technologies" and thoughts from Webquest creator Bernie Dodge. She writes, "Dodge warns teachers to use them thoughtfully.  “What we’re doing when we rush to embrace blogs and wikis, seems to be self-sustaining,” said Dodge, who has seen teachers “forcing these tools into being curricularly useful. Blogs and wikis suffer from the same fate as most new technologies. Early adopters rush to embrace them without thinking through their pedagogical purpose. It is important to figure out what it is about the format that makes it better than what it is you were doing before.  Insert these strategies where they make sense rather than just adopting them because they are new.” 

While I agree with this advice, I have to say I am finding that new teachers, just entering the educational field, are far more advanced in the "appropriate integration" of these tools. In my opinion they’re "very effective implementers." Just over the past ten years technology in the schools have gotten far more reliable which wasn’t the case then. Remembering my early days, the darn machines could barely work and there were a slew of other problems for those who wanted to enhance their curriculum using new methodologies. Gosh, just to load a videostream was a nightmare.

So I guess we’ve come a long way…baby.

-Amy Bowllan