21stcenturyed.com

June, July and August.

If those are three of the reasons you got into education, you may have chosen the wrong profession. Like social workers, doctors and other professions, educators have a serious charge: to help others.

So – sorry. It’s not really about you – it’s about them. The sooner you accept and embrace this truth – and live it out through your professional life – the sooner you’ll make real change in students’ lives.

Online educators, especially, must come to recognize that:

• …learning will not necessarily occur between 8:30 am and 3:30 pm.
• Students won’t always want to learn a topic the way you were trained to teach it – nor do they have to since they now have choices in education.
• What make school easier for you is not necessarily what is best for students. Like bell schedules, synchronous instruction or quiet classrooms.

So get over yourself. It’s not about you. Make the time to call your students and their parents. Stop reinventing the wheel just so you can say you wrote a great lesson. That’s time you could have spent explaining a difficult student to a student who needs you.

I challenge you to take 30 minutes to examine what and how you do things related to your teaching and to identify at least one thing that you could be doing to better meet the student needs.

Check out the date of my last blog post: March 24, 2010.
That was almost five months ago.

To be honest, blogging fell near the bottom of my list of priorities when – in March – I learned that I needed to have major surgery for the second time (the first was almost 10 years ago). When someone tells you they’re going to open your chest and stop your heart for a few hours, things like blogging tend to fall off the radar.

I’m happy to say that I am fully recovered and doing well, thank you. I’m back at work and just getting my digital life back on its feet. Facebook was my friend during my recovery period. The short spurts of information with a network primarily made up of my friends provided a ready path to update others and to receive their positive thoughts and prayers.

So – back to the blog. I hope you’ll follow along and be patient with me while I try a few things (e.g. experimenting with new themes, re-tagging my posts, etc.). I’m going to attempt to be a bit more prolific with my posts. I just have to work on the internal editor that keeps telling me “that’s not important enough to blog about”.

I hope you’ll come back often, follow the blog on via RSS and look me up on Twitter and Facebook – just click the icons to the left.

I have a lot to learn from you, and hope you feel the same.

Bigfoot Wants to Chat With You!

Today I had an actual conversation with a real live person on Chatroulette. I’ve checked this website out a few times since hearing about it online and in the news. Essentially, it is a game of Russian roulette played with webcams. You start the game and are then connected to another user’s webcam at random. If you (and they) like what you see you can chat. If not, you click “next” (or they do) and it’s off to the next random stranger.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of “nexting” going on, expecially when you are a boring, fully-clothed, overweight 40 year-old man like me. I don’t take it personally. But it seemed to me to be rather worthless except for the seedier uses of the site.
Today, I thought I’d try one more time to get someone to actually chat. I pointed the camera at paper signs I made with different comments like “Billions of dollars to create the Internet for this?!?” and “Is this everything you hoped it would be?” Many nexted me. But finally a young guy stopped and started to type to me, asking to show my face. Assuming this was going in a not family-friendly direction, I typed back that he didn’t want to see me as I was a 40-year old guy. He replied that he wanted to chat, but didn’t want to chat to a piece of paper. So I turned the webcam to face myelf and started typing away.
It turns out that he is a 17 year old guy from Germany, living on his own and just finishing his last year of secondary school. We chatted for a bit about Chatroulette and shared some funny YouTube links. Then I excused myself to go back to work.
So – maybe Chatroulette isn’t ALL sketchy characters looking for the equivalent of the electronic one-night stand. But I think there’s probably better ways to meet new people. Having an actual conversation (at least as a 40-year old using the tool) seems rather elusive.