Awake & Curious

I am excited, frustrated, and a little impatient.

We had Alan November at our School in Staten Island on January 13th, and as expected he was terrific. He really connected with our staff. With his permission I will be posting a pod-cast of that session in the near future. If you have never seen Alan speak I suggest you do. He is the ultimate teacher and does something all the really good teachers do, use their natural curiosity to drive their classroom/audience. Good teachers model learner’s curiosity for their students, unafraid of where that may lead . In essence creating the perfect classroom model, good teachers learn with their learners.

Okay so Alan was good.

Our teachers were inspired. Many are now playing with Skype, del.icio.us and Garageband.

Many are now open to seeing their classrooms, and how they teach in new ways. So What Now? How do we keep the momentum going, and just where do we want this momentum to take us?

Our plans are to contract Alan’s company as a blogging service and see where that leads. I myself am looking into some grant writing, to support our endeavors.

I will keep you posted as to how successful we are to try and get a good portion of our teachers running their own blogs, and just how this impacts our small special education school.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 Alan November

Written January 3rd, not posted until the 22nd

Well Maybe not such a big Hello, just Happy New Year. As an educator, I have been faithful to my mission, as blogger less so.

I was just doing my bloglines self assigned reading.  I think I read about 70 tech-ed blogs a week or so.   I was reading what blog guru Will Rich saw as his most important posts of the year. One struck a cord as I look at how faithless I have been to edublogging, Reinvention: I Quit , It was Will’s post on how he quit teaching to write books, present and blog and spend more time with his family.

I don’t know if his post makes me feel better or not. I think in my gut that good teachers, need to be in the classroom, in the schools, etc… So many of them, the good ones leave the classroom, for out of classroom positions or even better district supervisory jobs. I guess we need leaders and perhaps it is impossible to be good at two things at once. Will discusses leaving his job just short of a pension. My cynicism leads me to think presenting must be “lucrative” in order to make such a move.

I met Will at Alan November’s conference (BLC06) last year and he was quite good, I got a lot out of him and his book.

In this coming week I have Alan November coming to talk to my teachers about what classrooms should, could or will look like and anything else that he wants for that matter.

This post is raw and disjointed at best.

A nagging question I have had increasingly is if blogging is so wonderful, and I think it is, and if it is as Will points at very time-consuming how do we get teachers to embrace and actively blog? )It is not like they have a lot of extra time on their hands.)