How can I change in my practice?

After the readings and our first class, what is something in your practice that needs to change. Is there something that we did or read that sparked something in you.. and made you think - I could be doing something different that would make me more effective in my job, my life, or my role as a student?

After our first class I set a goal to challenge myself to improve in my practice. In class experience has given me new ideas that I would like to explore in my project. The readings by Prensky have also inspired me to reform my instruction.


Working on a wiki that would be useful in our learning team settings will be the perfect improvement to our communication strategies. At each of the schools in Norman we have have a learning team. These are a mixed group of people (all grade levels, some tech savvy, some not tech savvy) who can help us(the professional development facilitators) identify a learning need within the purview of the intelligent classroom initiative. Previously we had been communicating with learning teams through meetings and email. It makes sense to create an intelligent classroom learning team wiki where each school will have their own learning team page where they can communicate their needs and we can tailor our professional development sessions to fit that content. This will be a more effective form of communication and more time efficient.


I have read Marc Prensky's article before but after reading again for this class I found new insight. Prensky states, "The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the predigital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language." When I read this again I thought to myself, "This is a two way street." I consider myself a Digital Native and my job consists of instructing many Digital Immigrants. I have always thought this to be a difficult task, but it wasn't until reading this passage that I realized it is difficult because I am speaking a foreign language to most of my students. I am working on modifying my practice of technology instruction to communicate effectively to my Digital Immigrant students. I don't want to be the kind of instructor whose accent is so thick that you cannot understand the message. So, far what I have found to be the most efficient way to communicate instruction for Digital Immigrants is to allow them to be hands on with the technology while you are present to calm any fears they may have and answer any questions. Many Digital Immigrants are worried they are going to break the technology, once you can get them past that fear and to play around with the tech they reach a new comfort level.
It is a work in progress and I am always open to suggestion on how to effectively instruct and communicate with someone whose thought process is different from mine.