I am sitting at a table with other educators working with Will Richardson learning more about rss feeds, blogging, and wikispaces and how to use them as information farming and learning tools so desired information can be delivered, digested, and integrated into your way of knowing your world. Authentic, personalized learning that places the controls in the hands of the learner.

Will Richardson @ the DuPage ROE

I am sitting at a table with other educators working with Will Richardson learning more about rss feeds, blogging, and wikispaces and how to use them as information farming and learning tools so desired information can be delivered, digested, and integrated into your way of knowing your world. Authentic, personalized learning that places the controls in the hands of the learner.

It is Time to Start

I have sat in the background lurking, listening, and exploring all I can from the blogs of others. It is time for me to step out of my comfort zone and put my thoughts and opinions down and become engaged in a dialogue on chance favoring the prepared teacher. In my opinion, we have not reached a critical mass of where educators can benefit from a consistent philosophy and approach from their government, their communities, and their school districts when it comes to the unique and appropriate use of instructional technologies for student learning and the creation of socially and technologically literate and functional members of society.

Many teachers are having to deal with technology and instruction on individual levels and the success of such an approach is minimal and tends to occur serendipitously when a prepared teacher is exposed to an aspect of technology that fills an unique instructional need instead of all teachers have a sound background in an array of technological tools to used at their discretion to optimize learning and instruction.

The end result is a lack of saturation and consistent student exposure to rich, quality, authentic learning experiences in way that only instructional technologies can provide. Additionally, instruction does not leverage the attributes of the digital natives populate their class and veers away from the world in which they operate quite successfully.

It is amazing to me that we live in a society of ever-increasing complexity where our dependence on technology has quickly become a necessity and yet we have not collectively acknowledged this (this is the 500 pound gorilla sitting in the living room going unnoticed). As a consequence we have not come a national meeting of the minds and placed, in context, a need for the incorporation of learning technologies and skills into a students learning experiences at the earliest possible moment continuing throughout the rest of their lives….