Thursday, February 24, 2005

Keeping Up

Wow, I am finding that taking the time to blog is a lot more than I planned for, but an interesting experience.

I have trying to keep up with reading other blogs, especially those on technology and education (my area of interest), but there is so much going on it can be dizzying.

My main concern is that the majority of educators seem to be going along the same way day after day and technology is not making any impact on their educational life. I have heard the concerns and know there just is "not enough time". But what do we say to students that graduate and have only their own personal technology expereince to fall back on. OOOOPS. I think there needs to be a move to making a shift to allow integration of technology into education. I don't mean having students type up research papers on a computer, but a real move to technology use.

I know that it is important for skills development that we teach How to use Word or How to use Excel, but where is the lesson on what communication method should I use in this situation? This is what Digital Citizenship is all about - teaching about the real world uses of the technologies. I have been at this for two years and I am still learning new stuff, so how can we expect students to be prepared if we are not teaching them any of this?

More to come...

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Digital Citizenship

Digital Citizenship

New Start

I finally decided to take a stab a writing on my blog and seeing what might happen.

Currently, I am keeping busy with writing the chapters for the Digital Citizenship handbook. Once it is completed I will be looking for teachers and technology leaders that might be interested in reading.

It is coming down to crunch time for presentations. I will be presenting with Dr. Bailey on March 4 at the MACE conference here in Manhattan, KS. I have found out that David Warlick will be here to do one of the keynotes and hope that we can talk. On March 6 I leave for Salt Lake City to give the keynote at their Security Conference on Monday then followed up with three breakout sessions on Monday and Tuesday. Finally, at the end of the month (March 22) I am presenting in Kearney, NE for a group of trainers. Whew, March will fly by.

If you are looking for some of the past articles that have been written by Dr. Bailey and myself they can be found on the Digital Citizenship website - http://coe.ksu.edu/digitalcitizenship. We have two more articles that will be published in April - one for ISTE's L&L magazine and School Business Affairs magazine. It has been quite a year so far and more to come.

See you soon.