A QUESTION: TO SHARE AND WHEN NOT TO SHARE

I heard a new word yesterday used in our Technology Summit meeting. We should be "embedding" technology, not "integrating" it into our curriculum. I knew I had recently read about this and had seen the visual that was used during the meeting. Where was that, a sometimes difficult question with my current short term memory capacity.


So, where did I go? Right to my RSS feeds. I found it this morning in a short period of time, but two things struck me as I was looking. If I had bookmarked it using the tag "embedded" I could have found it much more quickly. I am almost embarrassed to say it, but I have still not been able to successfully change how I store and process information. I still, at times, print something so I have a hard copy instead of using the tools available to me that I know work. Old habits are indeed difficult to break, but I still keep trying.

The second thing was the importance of the information, who should know, and how we make decisions about when and what to share. If you read the site you can see the importance of the fundamental shift he suggests. Yet, if you were not at the meeting you might not be aware of it. Critical people in our system with responsibility for curriculum development were not at the meeting to hear this shift in how we think about technology tools. I know I still use the word integrate. Yes, we can become overwhelmed with information, but we need some structure in place to share "critical" information that will impact our work. Again, who and where will this take place. Right now I err on the side of sending a lot to a few people in the Teaching and Learning department. Sometimes I think they may have seen it because they read similar blogs and literature, but I send it knowing they can quickly delete. Should I be sending more to the ELT, to others?


This shift in thinking and action is important because it talks about the tools becoming a part of the learning environment, not something we try to fit into a lesson. It is why I think one of our priorities must be in identifying what it means to be technological and informational literate. Embedding this into the documents that drive our curriculum and then identifying for teachers and students the context for that learning, creates the situation described in the Thinking Stick. If you go to the blog post for the next day the conversation is continued with examples from classrooms.


If you keep these thoughts in mind and read this post about the future of textbooks, it makes you wonder what the classroom of the future needs to look and sound like.