Setting the Scene

Before I go too far into this, I want to make sure that no one gets the wrong idea.

I am not a tech expert.  I don't hold advanced degrees in educational technology.  I've never led workshops for an audience bigger than a couple dozen people from my own school or district, and few of those had a very heavy technology focus.

I want to be honest about all that up front, because I don't intend for this to be a blog where I advise, instruct, direct or persuade anyone to do things as I do.  I might wax poetic or excited about something I did with my students, and I'll share some things I wish I'd known before I did them, but I'm really not trying to sell THE way to do anything; instead, I want to share A way.  Consider my stories and examples just those - stories and anecdotes.

When I started teaching, it was in a large public high school in Tucson, Arizona where the instructional technology available in my classroom was an overhead projector and one desktop computer (mine, of course) with no way to share what was on my screen except to have thirty teenagers crowd behind me in the corner.  I considered myself pretty savvy when I purchased transparencies that could go through my printer so students could view something other than the overhead sheets that came with the giant anthologies they lugged from their lockers to class.  In the three years I taught there, I managed to get my classes into the one computer lab we had on campus (for eighteen hundred students!) four times.  Maybe three.  It just wasn't a priority.

The next school I worked in was much different.  It was an independent boarding school in an affluent suburb of Detroit, and right away, there were some big adjustments.  I had heard of Smartboards, but I had never used one, and I didn't really know what to do with it.  I got a laptop too, and a docking station in my classroom, but not a lot of effective training about how it might make me a more impactful or efficient teacher.  So, as it did for many of my colleagues, the Smartboard became a very fancy screen for movies I showed in class, until I got to pilot a program that sought to see how tablet laptops might be better utilized by teachers than traditional laptops.  It was the first time I examined deliberately and carefully the tools I was using to create, share and manage the work of my courses, and I enjoyed it.  The tablet laptops made it easier for me, as an English teacher, to see some value in the Smartboard, but it was frankly a little underwhelming.

It wasn't until I made another job switch that I drank the proverbial Kool-aid.  The third school I worked in was the first one-to-one school I spent any time in at all, and the learning curve was fast and steep.  Smartboards quickly felt archaic (Why would I need a screen? I can just push out my presentations to my students' tablets...), and after bemoaning a lack of good professional development in my prior position, I found myself under the very watchful eye of an incredibly effective academic technology director.  His expectations were high and his support was unflagging; the message was, you need to use technology meaningfully, but I'll help you any way I can.  I completed sixty hours of technology training the first year I was there, including a self-directed 23 Things project (which yielded one of the abandoned blogs), and I found myself talking about educational technology more and more with colleagues in and out of the building.  I knew about different presentation tools, and could debate the relative merits of different digital bookmarking sites, and started participating in different online personal learning networks.  I was fired up, and I knew how lucky I was to be at a school so progressive in its approach.

Thus, when I made the switch once more (and hopefully, I won't be relocating again any time soon), I was a little disappointed that it seemed I was about to take a step backwards.  I was working with younger students who were far less familiar with the applications I was used to, and they certainly didn't have tablets of their own in the classroom.  I didn't even get a laptop.  "That's okay," I told myself.  "I'll make some awesome Powerpoints."  And I did.  Then, a couple months later, there was a call for applications to the 21st Century Cohort for middle and high school teachers in our district.  The goal would be to improve teachers' technological literacy so that they could create authentic opportunities for students to learn critical technology skills, improve learning in their content area classrooms, and ultimately, train other teachers at school sites.

That's where I find myself now, happily moving through a program that has further deepened my interest in and passion for tech integration.  Most of the things I write about here come out of my work with that cohort and conversations I have with its talented and enthusiastic leaders.