It's 1:15 AM, and I just posted a PowerPoint presentation to my blog. How simple that sounds. Just a few slides -- how difficult could that possibly be?
Incredibly, agonizingly so. Three websites, five email/password combinations, and three hours: that's how difficult it was. Even now, two of my slides are inexplicably not where they were in the original presentation. I know they haven't moved in the original - I checked. Over and over again. And yet, even after the hair pulling, the simultaneous opening of six browser windows and four different applications, the cursing at inanimate objects, and the headache from squinting at a screen expecting the correct icon to appear by magic, I feel the rush of victory. I learned how to do something completely new this night. I followed the paths, I turned around at the dead ends, I never gave up. To the outsider, it may seem silly, even trite, to feel so victorious over 14 slides on a blog post. Not for me. I sit here in the quiet of early morning, and I know - I know how a student feels when the finally reach inside themselves and find it. When they find the knowledge, the confidence, the connections they didn't even know were there. I want that for them. I want every one of my students to feel the power of owning their learning the way I own mine tonight, and I mourn for those who may have come in and out of my doors and never felt it. In "Adopt and Adapt: Shaping Tech for the Classroom" (2008, Edutopia: The George Lucas Educational Foundation), Marc Prensky sums it up:
So, let's not just adopt technology into our schools. Let's adapt it, push it, pull it, iterate with it, experiment with it, test it, and redo it, until we reach the point where we and our kids truly feel we've done our very best. Then, let's push it and pull it some more. And let's do it quickly, so the twenty-second century doesn't catch us by surprise with too much of our work undone.
A big effort? Absolutely. But our kids deserve no less.
I concur. Tonight, I go to sleep one step farther along the path to true technological literacy. Another step tomorrow . . .
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