The First Shovel

Posted: May 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: blogging, Professional Development | Tags: , , , , , | 4 Comments

When I was early in my teen years, a neighbor hired me to do some construction which amounted to digging ditches around a house to relay drainage pipes. After the first few shovels of dirt hit the small pile, the immensity of the task ahead of me became glaringly apparent. As a young teen, this was no big deal; in fact, it probably served to blow off some of that excess energy. Where did that stuff go?

Walking away from #edcampbos, I was energized in the way only good professional development can. I haven’t made my way through hardly any of the copious resources put out by that day of collective sharing, learning, and teaching. The one area I have started to make some movement on is the education bloggers group on Facebook. I managed to get two docs in that group organized a bit, to follow all of the Twitter handles, and to subscribe to all of the listed blogs. My goal after this blog and my other is to settle in with my iPad and get some nice reading done while I work on a scanning project that gets amazingly tedious without another task to occupy my mind.

Unlike my youthful experience with shovel and mattock, this project is something of my own choosing, and it excites me. There is a lot of work, none of which is critical, but all of which I want to do. It is just a matter of selecting where to dig in for greatest effect because I cannot do everything I see to do already. I am sure as I get going, the scale of opportunity will only increase.

Did I Err?

Posted: February 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Web tools | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Today, in true Groo-like fashion, I think I blundered through Google plus groups with the skill of a rampaging and clumsy barbarian. I went through my whole contacts list and added people willy-nilly. I am beginning to believe that this serves Google really well, but probably put me back on the radar of people who may not even remember who I am or people with whom I may not want to strike up a new conversation. However, I am seeing more buzz about how Google+ is appearing in ed tech circles, so into it I charge. We shall see what the ripple effects and repercussions of this plunge into Google+ groups leads to.

On another front, I finally joined up with the Educators PLN, a ning group dedicated to networking educators. Specifically, I wanted to access some of the resources hosted there for the #edchat Twitter conversation. I have more hope for this foray; it might directly lead to better connections to other technology educators.

Tweeting

Posted: February 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Web tools | Tags: | Leave a comment

 Well, I have been playing around with Twitter. Mainly, I look at a few people’s tweets, auto publish two of my blogs to my Twitter feed (including this one; how recursive), and post links there from the RSS feeds I read. I am barely a blip in the Twitterverse. I do need to engage in the #edchat chattings and many other things to fully leverage this particular tool.

I did download hootsuite and tweetdeck to see if they would improve my experience, and I really have to say that I like the Twitter client better than these two highly regarded platforms. Perhaps power users would tell me what I am missing, but for now the Twitter client serves me just fine. 

Ultimately, I’d like something that aggregates my RSS feeds with Facebook and Twitter as Flipboard does, but I would like to be able to see my streams in a much more efficient interface rather than the pretty but time consuming one in Flipboard.

Slowly, Slowly Walk the Path

Posted: January 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

As I thought about this post, a Silly Wizard song popped into mind. Well, to be fair, the phrase slowly slowly walk the path did, and after some quick research on my iTunes and then on the web, I accessed all the lyrics to the song Golden, Golden. As often happens, the phrase seemed right, but the message of the song missed the mark.

Slowly, slowly, walk the path,
And you might never stumble or fall.
Slowly, slowly, walk the path,
And you might never fall in love at all.

CHORUS:
Golden, golden, is her hair,
Like the morning sun over fields of corn.
Golden, golden, is her love,
So sweet and clear and warm.

Lonely, lonely, is the heart
That ne’er another can call its own.
Lonely, lonely, lies the part
That has to live all alone.

Wildly, wildly, beats the heart
With a rush of love like a mountain stream.
Wildly, wildly, play your part
As free as a wild bird’s dream 

No, this really doesn’t relate to my slow pace of technological growth as compared with the leaders of the ed tech field or to my own goals and standards, but it is a very sweet song. In relation to my learning curve in ed tech, I am slow, but I do love it.

In this endeavor to keep two blogs daily, I have had to take some things slowly. So far, I have not had time to add in links to other blogs and do all of the connecting between my feeds that I would like. Today, however, I think I have successfully set up both my DaddingIdeas blog and this one to post automatically to Facebook and Twitter. It is part of the tangled web I am trying to weave, but it goes slowly.

I am constantly amazed at the output of the leaders in the ed tech world. Some, I must assume, even have children and other demands on their lives, but they still are able to consume and digest prodigious quantities of information that they then make available to us on blogs, tweets, etc. 

Yet I stay on this path, even at the slow pace I tread, because it energizes me and because it is now inextricably linked to my job. If I do not explore the available technology out there, then I can not make good recommendations to the teachers at my school about what to use and how to integrate it in the classroom.

So it is not in order to avoid stumbling and falling as the Silly Wizard lyrics admonish, it is just my avialable time and energy as well as my level of efficiency and skill that keeps me at this rate of technological development. And even at my slow pace, I love it!