These are some of my views on why teachers do not use Web 2.0 tools.  I have offered  4 institutes at Prairie Lands Writing Project exploring writing with technology.  The first one 3 years ago we started with basics of logining into a network, sending and receiving email and email attachments along with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel uses in the classroom.  The institute this year after I attended Chico in 07 we blogged, created digital stories, and did group investigations and presentatioins on a multitude of Web 2.0 tools. 

Challenges:

School blocked sites.  Many teachers take the blocked sites as fact and do not know how to go about asking the tech persons in their districts to unblock certain sites.

Time is the big issue for teachers to sort through the multitude of information to find the pertinent information.  Teachers, who teach 7 to 8 periods a day, try to have a family/social life outside of school, and then we expect them to gather information from the information explosion on the net.  If this were a businessman, lawyer, or doctor they would have several assistants helping them.  I feel time is a real issue.  We cannot create more time, but we can depend on a network of likeminded individuals to help us.

Knowledge and skills are also limiting factors for teachers who want to use the information available.  It takes time to learn new skills for finding and guiding students to create pertinent information.  Again I have found sharing with likeminded individuals a great help.

Strategies:

I depend a great deal on fellow TM06 members and others to point to pertinent information. Since the information is so abundant we can no longer be the teacher that closes his/her door and teaches his/her students.  Occasionally I stumble onto something I can share with the TL list serve.

Strategies to model for students and professional development:

Since I am retired from the K-12 classroom and now work for Prairie Lands Writing Project as their TL, I also get to present some professional development.  I usually try to continue sending suggestions to groups of teachers I present to throughout the following year.  This last advanced writing with technology I presented in June 2007, as a result of the mini grant I received form TM06, we established blogs, which I hope to nudge the participants to continue to use this school year.   I want them to take time to share what they explore and gain from others explorations.

Mary in Missouri

Listen to my VoiceThread file of a short descirption of the Writing Project -

    Writing Teachers  

From The Horizon Report:
"There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content. Although new tools make it increasingly easy to produce multimedia works, students lack essential skills in composition, storytelling, and design. In addition, faculty need curricula that adapt to the pace of change and that teach the skills that will be needed—even though it is not clear what all those skills may be."

What does this mean to us as educators? How do we utilize the tools available to us in purposeful ways? How do we lend our professional expertise to emerging technologies to help with the creation of compelling communication in our lives, our classrooms, and our writing project sites?

My first response to this quote is that I wouldn't assume that all students lack the skills in composition, storytelling and design.  In fact, some students, because of their use of the technology, may have developed some of these skills beyond what their instructors are capable of.  In fact, if we consider that media/technology is contributing to the development of new literacies, then, we as educators, need to first determine how literacies have and are changing and what skills are then needed.  We may not have some of the skills and/or knowledge to model for students yet.  We also need to determine which skills and knowledge hold or have value for the literacies created by technology.

When we talk about creating meaningful content, we need to help students think about audience and purpose just as they would without the technologies.  We need to help students understand revision and that even though they are constantly revising as they compose on the computer, let's say, they still need to reread and reorganize what they've created for final posting.  We need to get in there and do lots of experimenting with the technology ourselves to see which strategies and processes have value for working within particular venues.  As Karen McComas said yesterday, "students bring the technology knowledge, teachers bring pedagogical knowledge."  But, we still need to understand the technology knowledge in order to connect it with the appropriate pedagogical thinking.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Now that I get a message every time someone posts to the Tech Matters blog, I'm impressed with the amount of reading and responding people have been doing.  I'm also getting lists of entries from our site's Listserv about summer reading.  Where is everyone finding the time.

I guess I'm feeling overwhelmed by all that I need to be/should be doing.  How does everyone keep up? Although, yesterday, I did absolutely nothing and I still don't feel rested.  I must be doing something wrong.

I wanted to respond to Chris comment about honesty. It connects to other conversations I've been having with colleagues about identity and blogs and race.  I'll try to write about it and post iit in reply to Chris, but I feel obligated to do other things right now.