WTB? (Why the Blog?)

Teachers are busy people. They have to A: know their students (all of them) and B: know their content, and have to plan ways to get B to A in the best way for each child. This they have to do in short blocks of an hour or so at a time with breaks, interruptions and myriad whole school activities, excursions, and holiday periods.

It's not hard to see why many teachers resist change, in many cases they just don't have the energy to learn something new every 5 minutes, much less keep tabs on what to learn.

Technology is making things easier and harder at the same time, if that's conceivable. It's easier to connect with other professionals and find information, but there is a much greater expectation of knowledge to go with it. This will get easier as time goes by, but probably not in the next ten years. Gradually we are moving from a content-based curriculum to a learning-based curriculum, so rather than learning everything there is to know about a topic, we teach students how to find, process and present information.

I commented to a friend recently that had the internet not been invented, I would probably be considered ridiculously smart. It's because I'm a prolific reader, as a child I couldn't get enough books and would read anything and everything I could find. Sometimes to my own detriment. But as a result, I knew a lot of stuff. I was a font of knowledge. Of course, now that so much information is at our fingertips, knowing stuff is largely useless. Lucky for me, I also had an interest in computers back then so I rode through on the coat-tails of Generation X showing dangerous symptoms of Gen Y.

The purpose of this blog is not unique, there are plenty of classroom technology blogs out there. However everyone brings a different perspective to the table and I hope to be able to respond to demand through portals like Scootle Community and Twitter PLNs.

In many ways the technology still just isn't there yet - we still have so many logins that it's impossible to remember them all, and I'm yet to see a classroom that has consistently reliable equipment and internet. There are however many benefits to becoming digitally literate, and these aren't limited to the classroom. There's a whole wide world out there.