I have too taken the red pill

Ok now that you are reading this you, just like me, have taken the red pill and now we’re falling down the rabbit hole. The first thing that I am going to check out, as I am falling, is a few blogs on the web that deal with teachers and technology. I was pleased and lucky that the first blog I checked out, bionicteaching.com, was pretty funny. It is run by a guy named Tom. He kind of reminds me of myself. I mean his latest post is called “Introducing Randomness”. I mean if as a teacher that doesn’t catch your eye, what would? The really cool part of his blog is the digital story telling. What he did is go around where he lives and take pictures of strangers and asks them to tell him their story. It sounds kind of creepy, how many of us would think it wasn’t creepy if some guy came up to you and said, “Hey I don’t know you but can I take your picture and listen to your life story?”. Odd right? Anyway, I think it would be fun for my future students to create a digital history of their families. They can take some pictures of their family members, look up where they came from on the internet and even “borrow” some pictures form the web. The best part is I wont be asking them to be creepy and take pictures of strangers, you know what they say to young kids “stranger danger” I hope I didn’t just date myself.

I tried to keep the rest of my blog search to blogs that fit my personality. There was davidwarlick.com/2cents/ and in this blog he talks about his half baked and sometimes fully baked ideas that he has used in the classroom. I wasn’t always lucky as I kept falling down the rabbit hole. There were a few blogs that made me hit the walls of the rabbit hole. They were just not my cup of tea. When looking at Wes Fryer’s “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” I noticed that on the right his posts were rated by followers and the majority of them were no higher than a 7 out of 10. However, I looked around it and I was not impressed either. Last I looked at www.techfridge.com, this site was good. It had a lot of information for teachers. It ranged from things to do over the summer, such as Creating your own Comic. Now what kid wouldn’t think that is awesome.

So after checking out a few blogs I finally reached the end of the rabbit hole and my feet touched the ground. Now the question is what did I learn? Well I learned as you fall in the world of the internet/rabbit hole, it is ok to stick out you hand a touch a few different things/websites. Not all of them will be good but there will be a few that peak your interest. There are ideas that you can “borrow” like creating a digital story or a digital history. Or having Zero Tolerance when it comes to teaching these new technologies. New technologies are coming and we better get our kids out in front of it. A lot of these blogs just really made me think and I guess that was surprising. I thought they would be a lot of tips on what to do in your class. But as stated before there were a lot of cool ideas.

Now I find myself at another crossroad do I eat the bread a grow bigger or take a drink and shrink. In other words which blog do I follow, bionicteacher or 2 cents. In this case I will not pick just one I will bounce back and forth between the two. That means I will need to figure out another way to check through the tiny door into Wonderland. I guess I’ll just have to kick it in.