So today one of my teachers stopped by to check in, get his room in order and share his recent trip to Peru. Due in large part to a recent parent auction, a fund was established at our school to create an opportunities for faculty to travel around the world to places that will impact their teaching and curriculum. David Bill shared some of the highlights of his voyage and plans for the remainder of the summer. Our brief conversation covered such topics as hiking in the Andes mountains, eating exotic foods, witnessing a teacher protest resulting in tear gas and shots being fired and of course, technology.
Dave is a teacher that really enjoys integrating technology into his classroom. It happened to be ironic that he should walk into my office this afternoon because I had just been given a link to a great little app called Jing Project. From the Jing website:
“The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.
It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else. Tell us what you think so we can figure out what that is.
Try it, you’ll like it. Find out more in the FAQ, or on the weblog .”
Very cool. Jing was forwarded to me by another teacher at our school who willingly shared with me and gave Dave full credit for finding it. (slow realization that I am in the process of becoming the equivalent of a middle aged golden retriever)
Dave and I continued to discuss our work on our websites/blogs over the summer, changes we had made, Wordpress plugins we had installed, ideas for integrated the technology into our courses this fall when I came to the realization that the web 1.0 generation x’er in me was thinking inside the box with respect to my web strategy. Dave helped me uncover some new ideas with respect to how to maximize the power of Wordpress and blogging as well as take the use of the web further into 21st century.
As administrators, the willingness to engage in conversations often comes easy to us. The ability to be open to new ideas, new strategies and new fresh ideas is what often takes a little more work. So who says you can’t teach a web 1.0 dog new tricks??
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Almost American 08.28.07 at 12:31 am
“the web 1.0 generation x’er in me was thinking inside the box with respect to my web strategy.”
Do tell us more! What was so old-fashioned about what you were doing? How did you change it?
Antonio 08.28.07 at 1:05 am
Great question Almost American, in fact, I had spent a significant amount of time working with a “static” HTML website using Mac’s iWeb software. My thinking was it was easy enough to use, I love the ability to integrate multimedia, photos, videos and yet after many iterations, I was in fact limited with regard to blogging, integrating wiki’s, the multimedia support did not, at the time, support YouTube embedding very easily. In fact, I had to use a neat little app to create a workaround called iWeb Enhancer.
Apple has since released a new version of iWeb that includes this functionality.
Needless to say, my mindset was to see the web as flat and static information. My embracing of read/write/web technologies allowed me to see the potential of immediate posting of information, that text is flexible rather than static and that blogs and wikis in particular provided more interaction with my students than a static page ever could. The key for me was to move away from seeing my web page as an information portal to embracing it as an extension of my classroom. Great question!
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