Illustration by Doug Potter from the Austin ChronicleIn trying to better understand my 2007 desire to blog (somewhat inefficiently at the moment), you might care to know that I am secondary school faculty member living and working here in Oakville, Ontario. Working as a full time special education resource teacher, one of my daily needs is to understand and use the ever evolving technology associated with the computer and the Internet more effectively. To become more effective in the use of IT, I believe that my teaching/learning processes will become an even greater resource and learning support for my students. To more fully empower my students who use software and hardware technology everyday in their learning journey is something I most certainly aspire to everyday.
One of my personal learning goals, for my students, is to make their learning positive and cutting edge. As a special education teacher, my students despite their learning exceptionalities, know more about computer technology than many who are business leaders or teachers. They are very likely far more advanced than their parents because they use the resource everyday in school and at home for communication and social networking. This hands on computer knowledge is often misunderstood by the business community, employers and society. I learn from them everyday. Thanks gang for “teaching” me!
Why did I start this blogging adventure?It truly was a discovery of new learning. A very interesting gentleman, on a one year exchange to our school (from Sydney, Australia ~ "OZ") got me started, when I began to read his exchange journey blogging and the many connections between his teaching and his family’s exchange adventure.
If you desire an enjoyable series of short reads and a different view of our Canadian culture , check out his blogging entries. He documents the before journey by his family (http://canada2006.blogspot.com/), the many experiences here in North America and his family's return to “Oz”. Chris opened my eyes and my mind to the positive use of blogging for personal discourse and more importantly for educational use in this highly technological world. He also has several other blogs for education and personal use. One of his blogs shows his students in action as they create their own blogs and musings. Another of his blogs is an exchange of his thoughts and ideas on teaching, learning and education and the responses of others from around the world.This technology learning journey is also part of my own professional development plan. Blogging will allow me to write my thoughts and ideas and actually share them potentially with the world. (Who knows if anyone else will read them? If there is an opportunity for an exchange of thoughts and ideas then I will gain much more as an educator and as a blogger. Perhaps indirectly all of this will improve my communication and writing skills! Whether anyone else reads these blogs will tell with time however it would be nice to have others critique my thinking. I can imagine connecting with others from just down the street or on the other side of the planet.
My first few months of blogging will be a very steep learning curve (aside from newer GUI interfaces, my last foray into software programming involved early software such as "Fortran" and "WatFor". The learning and programming using of HTML, XHMTL (XML) and other much more friendly programming languages will hopefully allow me to be able to grasp and use such concepts as hypertext, tags, tables and titles through blogging and the internet.The ultimate goal is to be able to use these skills and newly learned computer programming language tools efficiently in my blogging and especially in my teaching and in the education environment. As a teacher continuely developing, improving and learning new appraoches for my teaching will ultimately allow me to share these skills with my students everyday.
