Last school year I took what I learned from the K12 Online Conference and put it into action.  I sought out a teacher who would be willing to join me in an online collaborative project and we used a wiki and a blog with our two classes.  The students were very excited to be working with a group of students on the other side of the ocean and one of my students remarked that she was motivated to work hard on this project because of the global audience who would be watching via the web.  I recently bumped into one of my students from that class who has now graduated and she asked me if I was doing another “wiki project” because she thought it was “so cool.”  As a teacher you wonder what they will remember once they have left you.  I am confident that the students who engaged in this project will remember this learning experience they had in my class.

 But to get to my former student’s question about whether or not I am doing another “wiki project” the answer is I sure hope so!  To that end, I had been thinking about a way to connect with teachers who would be willing to join me and my students in a collaborative adventure.  So to try and establish some connections with Catholic teachers who would be interested in giving their students a learning opportunity like the one my students had I have set up a place for developing a community of Catholic Teachers Online.  It is a wiki that I have set up to allow you to let the Catholic education community who you are, your grade/level, subject area, and to start conversations with other Catholic educators that would be interested in making a connection.  I hope we can build a community of educators who are brave enough to step outside the box and start something new and exciting for their students.

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web 2.0
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On Tuesday night I had quite a night. I sat down for a “fireside” chat with around one hundred teachers and education technology guru David Warlick to have a conversation about what it means to be an educator of today’s “info savvy students” in the “new information landscape” and the changing boundaries that we are experiencing due to technological developments. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my classroom practice and the limitations that I face due to restricted access to technology. As one of my colleagues likes to say “our classrooms look the same they did when we were in school” twenty years ago. We still have the same old set up of rows of desks facing the front that creates this sense of education as a system for the passive reception of knowledge from the “sage on the stage.” It kind of makes me wonder when I think about my own Catholic tradition of education that recognizes, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, that education is not mere transmission of knowledge from one who possesses it to an empty vessel. Yet there we are. David’s keynote struck a chord with me when he said, some schools are seeing the possibilities of the use of technology and they should serve as a model for all of us in education. The schools in my board have a ban on cell phones and iPods in the classroom. It is true that often times students are using them in an inappropriate manner, however, this is, perhaps, a symptom of the lack of change we have admittedly seen in the way we educate. It sent chills up my spine when David was talking about today’s students and their connection to their technology and their networks and how they are like aliens with invisible tentacles that keep them connected and “the problem is when they come into our classroom we chop those tentacles off because we want our children to be the students we want to teach rather than teaching the children that they are and this is an insult to our children.” I think we need to speed up the rate of change before we are the ones who are chopped off and become irrelevant.

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education technology
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