"idk, my bff jill?"

During my last drive to Virginia, I spent some time catching up on long overdue podcasts, including Dr. Yong Zhao's keynote speech from the BLC 2007 Conference. He constructed an interesting analogy between the inventions of the printing press and the Internet, stating that the the printing press necessitated that the average person become a reader, and the Internet now necessitates that the average user become a writer. This is such a powerful statement for educators -- that as blogging, etc. continue to shape students' worlds, that writing (specifically, writing for an audience) will take on new meaning and relevance.

Of course, the idea of blogging changing the face of writing has its downsides, too -- the prevalence of texting and blogging has already changed the casual form of written English that is used by many students.

This form of written English has truly become a standard dialect with teens. Many of us squirm at the very thought -- how will students ever learn the difference between you're and your if they can just write "ur" and do away with the whole thing? How can the world possibly go on as it should when the masses are homophone-illiterate?

I wish I were more tolerant, but I am one of those grammatical elitists who has to fight an urge to scream every time an educated adult writes "she think's" or "their going." At the same time, I was actually a linguistics major who believed in the idea that languages should change over time, and that unnecessary grammatical constructions should be phased out over time. Does that mean that I must be willing to embrace the "l8r" generation's form of written language? I'm not sure I can stomach it!

Of course, the "l8r generation" got me thinking about something else I heard recently -- that as more and more non-native English speakers adopt English as their primary language, those of us who speak the American English "dialect" will actually become the minority. The outsiders. The people tied to a past when the U.S. presided over all. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Indian businessmen and women will adopt and develop their own simplified (and therefore more linguistically advanced, believe it or not) English. Those of us still complaining about subject-verb agreement will be wasting our time on obsolete, inconsequential details. Is it possible that those of us complaining about "ur" will be in the same boat?

Blackboard Exemplary Course Tour

I was recently chosen to record a tour of my Blackboard site for our local Exemplary Sites page, which highlights the "best" Blackboard sites in Central New York. I was very excited to get to do this, and pretty happy with how the final product came out. It is also a great resource to be able to view other outstanding tours and see first-hand how different educators have used Blackboard. I have all kinds of new ideas on what to do next! Click here to listen to my tour...and please, let me know what you think!

Creative Writing Prompts

Taken from Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

• Using blank (i.e. no captions) cartoons, create your own humorous captions for the cartoons;
  
• Write a story based on only a title, picture, or title/picture combo, i.e. "The Octopus's Sneakers" (think Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick);
• Respond to real-life challenges, such as convincing a teacher to let you make up a missed assignment, or going to your first middle school party and not knowing anyone in the room;
• Write a mini-saga: an exactly 50-word story with a beginning, middle, and end;
• "Riff on opening lines" -- use powerful opening line prompts to write a new story, for example, "Call me Ishmael";
• Play "Who are these people?" -- make up stories for the people in line at the bus stop, buying lottery tickets, etc.
  

A Three Dog Life

An excerpt from A Three Dog Life, by Abigail Thomas, on the wisdom of dogs:

"I watch my dogs. They throw themselves into everything they do; even their sleeping is wholehearted. They aren't waiting for a better tomorrow, or looking back at their glory days. Following their example, I'm trying to stick to the present."

War on Technology?

For the past few weeks, I have been in a fight with technology. It all started when I somehow mangled my RSS feed for this blog. It was my fault, really. I had been working at the computer for too long and was letting myself get frustrated with some of the tics on FeedBurner. A few rage-infused clicks of the delete button, and my blog info was lost in RSS purgatory. I shut down my computer for most of the day, only using it to check e-mail periodically. For two weeks, I left my blog and the various errors within it to rot. I Xed out of Twitterific more often than I read my tweets. I ignored Google Reader and growled at my computer every chance I got. At school, I haphazardly deleted student blog posts for minor infractions of the rules. Not only that, but I changed my daily routine. I spent more time at the gym, went to bed earlier each night, and spent more time reading those books and professional magazines that had been stacking up for months. I was honestly having fun NOT being on speaking terms with technology, for once.

This is not without a little necessary caution, but finally, after two long weeks of estrangement, I am ready to make up. Being able to experience the position of a technophobe (relatively speaking) got me thinking about why so many people still shy away from technology. As an energetic young educator with a pretty big crush on my Mac and all things Web 2.0, I tend to secretly pass judgment on those who do not share my enthusiasm. I am a crusader for the importance of 21st century skill development in schools and am often dismayed at the seeming lack of support or interest in these vital skills. When I first read Karl Fisch's post, "Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher?", my answer was pretty one-sided: no. I actually found myself cheering when I read this paragraph:

The Fischbowl: Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher? via kwout

But this past week, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from certain unexpected teachers about how happy they are that I am teaching technology skills in the library and how important it is for the students. I couldn't quite reconcile that with my earlier perspective, and started thinking about why this might be so. I came up with a few ideas:

1. There are plenty of truly important curricular areas that I personally have no desire to teach. This reluctance is not at all because I think they are of lower value than other subjects, but because I know I am not the best person for the job. Sure, I could learn what I need to know and do a passable job, but perceptive students would pick up on my lack of true enthusiasm and knowledge within seconds. It is the same with technophobic teachers. Do we really want to force them to embrace and teach technology when it just may never be their thing?
   
2. Maybe being a librarian has given me a leg up in this department -- I am not used to knowing the answers, I'm used to knowing where to find them! It is almost part of my job description not to answer students' questions, and instead to direct them in seeking the answers. I get tons of requests for information I know absolutely nothing about (even at the elementary level), and I have learned not to try to fake it. Teachers are different -- they are used to knowing all of the answers. They impart wisdom and knowledge on a daily basis, and they are very good at it. So it's not that the technophobes think technology is unimportant. But from their perspective, it is easy to forget that embracing technology does not, and in fact cannot, necessitate mastering technology. It is difficult for those who are accustomed to mastering content to view technology not as a content area, but as a tool.
3. In order to truly embrace technology, many teachers would have to actively let something else go. What should we tell them to abandon? Time with their families? Time for their own physical and mental health? Time helping students learn to read and write? I look to the teachers with 10 years experience as model teachers, but sometimes it's easy to forget that they were already contributing their energy and enthusiasm to projects I knew nothing about while I rolled my eyes in 10th grade French. In this one respect, I am "lucky" in that during my first year of teaching, I am living here in Central New York with little in the way of family, friends, or outside entertainment and have plenty of time to devote to this form of professional development. But should other teachers be punished because they actually have lives?
   

That being said, I'm still not ready to give up any ground. (When am I ever?) Fisch goes on to state:

"But then I think of our students, and the fact that they don't much care how much is on our plates. As I've said before, this is the only four years these students will have at our high school - they can't wait for us to figure it out."