Innovative Learning Conference ’08

By heather on October 13, 2008

Well, I’m off to San Jose to present at the ILC.  I’ll be presenting my session, “Podcasting with 50 Middle Schoolers – RU Crazy?!”  It isn’t just about podcasting.  It’s also about the evolution of a tech-tentative Language Arts teacher into an educator who knows without a doubt that if I hadn’t jumped on the tech bandwagon, I would have been left in the academic dust.  

I deeply believe that unless we as educators take ourselves out of the boxes of lessons that made up our own educational backgrounds, and learn the technology that will be our current students’ futures, then we are not preparing them as we should.  Our job is to prepare them for the “real world,” and that world is different than the one we grew up in.  For that reason, I jumped into the uncomfortable deep end, where I not only learned to swim, I grew gills.

Teaching with technology has enriched my Language Arts program and has allowed me to do something that we all should do sometime in our career: create an elective (see Step IV in my “How to Take Control of Your Teaching” post).  

My podcasting class is an offshoot of my Speech and Debate team.  It has exploded as a standards-based, broadcasting network that is entirely student written, performed, produced, and publicized.  

As always, at any tech ed conference, I look forward to seeing the other sessions as well.  Hopefully, I may even see some of you there too.

Long Live CUE!