Weekly+Learning+Journal

Sunday November 8, 2009 I am creating my first wiki journal page, and having much difficulty. I am using my new computer, so I first have to locate all of my old information on my home laptop, and tranfer it here. I really am a technologically illiterate person, so I'm sure there is a better way to do it, but I don't know it. I am also trying to follow the online tutorial, which is helpful. I hope I can get it all figured out by 9:00 tonight. To complicate matters, I left my notebook at school, and it has the notes I took at our face-to-face meeting on Friday. I will have to learn the hard way. I had to watch this week's video several times, to catch all of the information. The pages and text changed so quickly I was only about halfway done reading them when they changed. I guess that is part of the fast-paced 21st century learning. I am sure if I had let my teenage sons watch it, they would have caught it all the first time. This weeks reading was not really surprising. I'm sure many students would prefer to have more high-tech ways of teaching and learning. I hope that through this course I can provide at least some additional teaching and learning through those methods. But as some of the replies to the article indicated, there are roadblocks to some of these methods which the average classroom teacher may have little control over. In my own district we have a security system in place which blocks access to many sites. In addition, we are all under constant pressure to prepare our students for the state testing, which definitely does not follow the 21st century learning philosophy. The section of the reading which talked about "continuous partial attention" really hit home. I see that in my classroom every day, and from my own children at home. They always seem to be doing multiple things at one time, but not fully focusing on any of them. This is something I personally have great difficulty doing myself. This will certainly be a challenge for all of us "more experienced" teachers to deal with as our students become more and more inundated with technology. Mark Smith