Rethinking
I had one of those moments the other day while blogging. I was frustrated over a ‘workshop’ that I had to give on streaming video. It was one of those requested by the principal, “Make sure they know how to use it.” Well, I fell into taking on that wrong mindset. I should have used this as an opportunity to get beyond the ‘facts’ of using the web site and having the teachers think about how they’re students could use this. And center some dialogue around that. This could have worked well especially in this case, since many of them were somewhat familiar with the technology.
What did I learn from this? As professional developers we should model what we want teachers to do in the classroom with their students. I complained about this very thing at a conference I went to in January. And here I was doing the same thing! Duh. The session wasn’t a bust, but it wasn’t as nearly as effective as it should have been.
As I’ve said in numerous posts, effective technology use requires a paradigm shift. This takes time, and it certainly isn’t pervading the system yet. So the next time someone asks me to do some training, I’ll be more aware of the mind set surrounding that request and use it as an opportunity to model better teaching practice.
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