Last week the fab-u-lous newspaper staff and I along with my hall monitoring buddy Rhonda piled into two school suburbans and journeyed to participate in The Dallas Morning News Journalism Day extravaganza.
On the way there, I asked the amazing Shannon, my editor-in-chief, how she was doing. To which, she responded (in hopes that I would mention it in my blog) that she was "Fired up about life."
While the kiddos attended some interesting seminars presented by professional journalists, I hiked over to another building for a session about "social media" taught by a very nice techno guru kind of guy--Kevin Sharpe. The session primarily focused on Twitter and TweetDeck.
Instead of raising our hands to ask questions, we were suppose to tweet our questions. Fine and dandy, but I noticed something. People (like me) would tweet a question, but rarely were those questions answered because people were lost in their own steady stream of tweeting. It all rather reminded me of those people who stand in the produce section of the grocery store and look like their talking to radishes when they're really talking to someone at the other end of their Bluetooth. (At least, I hope there's someone at the other end.)
Although I'm still not quite sure about why everyone should be all a twitter about tweeting, I figured I would just roll with it. So the next day when I returned to school, I really tried to implement some of this new found knowledge. Instead, I couldn't get logged on to TweetDeck. Some dumb upside bird with error 500 appeared, reappeared and reappeared over and over and over again. If that stupid bird, weren't already dead I think I would have popped him full of birdshot myself.
And they wonder why teachers are so reticent about implementing new technology into their classrooms.
Yeah, I guess you could say that I'm pretty fired up, too. I'm just not so sure it's about life.
Tweet that.
1 comment:
What's the point of trying to use new technology at school. In our district they are so into blocking all the "bad" stuff, that they block most of the good stuff as well. We sign an Acceptable Use Policy, but then they treat us like we didn't. Teachers really don't have many more access rights than students. And they hardly have any.
A few teachers at school were paying for their own broadband wireless connections so they could do things in class. Then this year they told us that doing so was a violation of the AUP. I asked the technology specialist to show it to me in writing. Because I know what I signed.
She wouldn't do it, but we stopped the wireless due to intimidation.
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