Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

I’ve always been an advocate for technology in the classroom, but it wasn’t until recently that I began heavily reading and researching its effects and purported effects on student achievement.  I started reading blogs, current research, and eventually started my own blog. Along the way, I picked up a couple of interested teachers with whom I am continuing to work on a wiki project for their science classes. 

Last week, I was invited by one of our teachers to participate in a series of professional development chats she was going to host in her classroom at lunch.  She was calling this “study group” Teaching with the Internet.  I was immediately intrigued.  I asked her if the two of us could meet during lunch and offered to lend some support.  She graciously accepted and we were off and running.  We’ve got a rough outline of what we want to accomplish — we’re limited to about 30 or 35 minutes weekly — and we’re hoping to gather some momentum along the way.

We opened the first session with 12 participants last Wednesday by showing “The Machine is Us/ing Us ” to the group. The video generated some good discussion and left more than a couple of teachers scratching their heads and making comments like, “Man — this stuff has really passed me by…”

We followed the video by reading and discussing the article from December’s TIME magazine titled, “How to Bring our Schools Out of the 20th Century.” The article generated some interesting discussion that will carry over to the second week of the study.  Namely, a couple people questioned whether the "our schools are preparing students for an industrial and agrarian society" argument is an overused cliche’.  I’m not sure that it is, but I read about this stuff for hours every week and so refrained from commenting to let the discussion play out.  All in all, many of us were late to our after-lunch classes because we were enjoying the discussion.  I was pleased to see that we as a group were able to move beyond, "Well, if The District would only give us more money (or more computers, or more training, or more [insert here]), then we could do all this stuff…"  One of the Language Arts teachers even went back to her classroom and started a blog where she posts poetry and asks her AP students to post their reactions.

Lao-Tzu said that even the longest journey must begin where you stand.  I’m hoping that we’re at least starting to pull at some of the roots keeping us standing in the same, comfortable place.