Congratulations for attempting to broaden the horizons of educators. A lot of teachers do not realize the power of these new technologies and with more and more of them popping up everyday, they are getting more and more user friendly. I completely agree with you that if you are going to ask others to take a risk then you have to lead by example. I was wondering since some time has passed since your post, how have things been working in your Tech Wednesday’s? Also, I assume that all of you use Power Point for presentations. Have you ever thought of really exploring that program. Power Point has some really amazing features on it especially with the new Microsoft Office 2007 version. If you are really familiar with the program, see what your colleagues experiences are because their may be features they don’t even know about.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Michalek

As for the revisited Bloom taxonomy, is the upper levels miss the synthesis level because the latter is included in the upper level-creating?

Diane: Do I want students to pay adequate attention to both the presentation and the chat? Not really…I want them to pay attention to where they’re going to learn most. Some teachers only wrote two or three things in the chat room and found focusing on their attention on the presentation was the best way to learn. Others found the conversation in the chat room more stimulating and allowed their attention to go there. Was learning happening in both places? Yes…it’s being able to give up the control and know that they are not going to be adequate attention that is the tough part.

I had the same experience with Ustream. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I only chat and tune in and out of the stream. My attention is were learning is happening for me in that space and time.

Ann: Session ran just about an hour. The two videos and me chatting for about 15 minutes. We paused twice for discussions in there as well.

Karen: Agree and in this situation. I was the teacher and my teachers were my students. So you’re correct in that’s pretty much what I meant. As teachers we have to be willing to take risks and we have to be willing to fail.

We talk about wanting students to take risks and teaching them that it’s OK if you fail, you tried you learned something, now move on. But do we model that in our classrooms. How many teachers have a lesson that goes really bad (we’ve all had them) and stood up in front of their class and said, “Look, I tried something new and it bombed…that was a horrible lesson…of well we’ll try it again tomorrow.”

How powerful would that be in the classroom? Would that model for our students that it’s OK to fail and try again?

On another note, I wonder if we can change your opening sentence to this:

We can not expect STUDENTS to take a risk and try something new if we ourselves are not willing to try something new.

and look at learning from our students perspective. They observe everything we do, and our actions speak volumes. (I know this is a different blog post but that opening resonated with me.)