Small turn out March 1st for what turned out to be a good workshop, in spite of some technical difficulties. The entire network at our school had two complete outages, due to a major problem at Verizon. We had Jim Weinzloff from November Learning. For those of you who have had the pleasure of Alan November as presenter you are familiar with how ” big” he can be in his thinking, and his presentation style. He is an idea man as he stated last year at the conclusion of BLC 07.

This year Alan spent several fruitful Saturdays with about a third of our teachers .  Jim’s style was smaller, but very warm, friendly, and informative. He did some nice work with Google Maps ( which has some cool new features), Sketchup and pod-casting. Our staff really seemed to “get it” that morning. I don’t know if it is because they have been exposed to more of this stuff thanks to a literacy grant from SI Foundation which has footed the bill for this high quality Pd this year, but our teachers followed him with good understanding, and a few of them applied what they learned in their classes the next week.

As I said we had Alan come to our school several times this year, and I have to admit we are seeing small  shifts, mainly in language. Our staff has added the terms blog, podcast, google apps to their professional vocabulary. A portion of them are blogging and many are using del.icio.us and skype at least in their personal lives, and about a third of our staff has been introduced to and use Google apps (some have created their own Google search engines, and use Google docs as a collaborative word processor).

Now as pessimistic as I can be, and have been in the past, I admit it is beginning to sink in and there are small measurable changes.

A few years back when I started blogging coming back from my first BLC conference, filled with piss and vinegar, I also came back speaking a slightly different language then my colleagues. Now many of them are at least familiar with some of the terms and tools like Jing, and pod-casting software such as Audacity and Garageband( we are a Mac environment for the most part)So all and all, a good start.

As an aside, I had the good fortune to be in attendance with Will Rich Yesterday at District 75’s main digs, and he was beyond wonderful. He reminded me resolutely that this is about learning networks, not just cool tools. Connections that make you grow professionally, and personally, often delivered with amazing immediacy. (Case in point MIT Opencourseware,all of MIT’s courses are now available online with video, all kinds of supports for FREE!)Which gives me some direction for next year. Our staff has begun to tentatively sip the from the Cool-tool Koo-laid. But that is just the first step, now the challenge is greater. How can we get them to see that building online learning networks of their own will empower them beyond their imagination? I will blog about Will Rich in the next few days.

So we are crawling forward towards the 21st Century.