For the last week or so my brain has been on fire. In the classroom I am facilitating three very complicated, exhausting, yet rewarding projects with my students. One dealing with creating art, specifically poetry/songwriting to affect social change; the second is a standards-based, student-designed project, connecting the lessons learned from the fall of the Roman Empire to today’s world; and the third is a video project illustrating the similarities between raising plants from seeds and reading. I hope to have more complete descriptions of these projects on this site soon. To begin with, I only mention them, because in addition to running around my classroom like a crazy person, I have fully immersed myself back into the world of technology and education.

Furthermore, after several weeks of procrastination, I have finally completed my student blogging permission slips and sent them to my principal for approval; I have also spent every waking hour that I am not planning on Twitter, my Google Reader, and Skype. I have been building my network. Most importantly I have been reading blogs by, learning from, and talking to other teachers around the world. Being engrossed in this state of learning has me buzzing. I am constantly thinking about the information that is falling into my lap, by magic as it sometimes appears.

But let me get to my point; a few days ago while I was in this intellectual trance, I mentioned at a grade level meeting that I wasn’t satisfied with the level of conversation my small team was having about technology. I was so excited about the things I have been doing that it didn’t seem right that I couldn’t share them with the people I work closest with. I told them that I would love to be the go to guy, if they had any questions about using technology in their classrooms. I wasn’t any more sure what that meant than they did. I just wanted to be having the conversations I am having online with my peers.

Today, I received an email from a colleague asking me what I meant by integrating technology. I have been thinking about it all day, and now as I lay here in bed at 10 pm let me see if I can articulate my passion.

I cannot remember where I read it, so I cannot quote verbatim or link to the site, but in one of the many blogs I read someone said how they hate the term integration. The post stated that we should not be looking for ways to implement technology into our lessons for the sake of technology integration, but rather that technology should simply be the way we do business. It should be ingrained in our style of teaching.

So integrating technology does not mean using Power Point, creating videos, or even blogging. I see effectively using technology as a way to help students experiment with new tools to help them discover how to access, interpret, and use information not only from static web-based sources, but from interactive student-created networks. Will Richardson says, “One of our changing roles as teachers revolves around the idea that we are now connectors as much as content experts.”

Using student-created networks to search for knowledge seems crucial. The next step as I see it, is to empower students to synthesize their learning, create/produce  work that reflects this synthesis , and redistribute the work back onto their network. I want to create a class full of Uploaders, students who are active participants in the exchange of ideas, information, and knowledge. I think Kim does a nice job of summing up my thoughts here.

As a lifelong learner myself, I am seeing the advantages of these network tools and concepts in my own learning and processing of information. Richardson goes on to say, “We who travel around evangelizing these technologies are for the most part simply trying to start some conversations, conversations that are going to be unique for every school, every community, every district. Nothing does that better than making our own practice transparent to the people in the room.”

By offering my services to my team, I was simply trying to start these conversations.  I hope once I have my students blogging and my classroom connected, my students and my peers will start to see how I use my network as a model and become curious to see how it all works.

I think it is important to mention at this point that I am no expert. I am learning as I go along. But I feel that I have support from the people I interact with on the web. Imagine giving our stdnets that sense of support. So when we ask questions like what does technology in the classroom look like? I say, I don’t know. What should it look like? Let’s talk about it.

I agree with apophenia who says, “Stop fearing and/or fetishizing technology. Neither approach does us any good. Technology is not the devil, nor is it the panacea you’ve been waiting for. It’s a tool. Just like a pencil. Figure out what it’s good for and leverage that to your advantage. Realize that there are interface problems and figure out how to work around them to meet your goals. Tools do not define pedagogy, but pedagogy can leverage tools. The first step is understanding what the technology is about, when and where it is useful, and how it can and will be manipulated by users for their own desires.”

Without these conversations schools will not move forward. I have learned the hard way that you cannot instill a passion for new ideas if people are not open to learning them. In closing, I would like to end with a beautifully articulated paragraph from Ewan in his online debate at The Economist. He says, …technology in education is less about anonymous chips and bytes filling up our children with knowledge, less about teachers reinforcing a ‘chalk and talk’ style with an interactive whiteboard, and less about death by PowerPoint bullets. It’s more about helping learners become more world-aware, more communicative, learning from each other, understanding first hand what makes the world go.” around.

Let me repeat that:

It’s more about helping learners become more world-aware, more communicative, learning from each other, understanding first hand what makes the world go around.

I will use whatever tools are at my disposal to make that happen. What about you? Any ideas? Don’t be shy; leave a comment. Let the conversations begin.