Two things come to mind when I think about how I’ve built my tech skills successfully in the past: get a buddy and jump into the deep end.
Honestly, I don’t get a buddy as often as I should. I have to say that they’re much better for morale, are great to bounce ideas off of, and can help with their expertise when you’re stuck. So though I don’t buddy up as often as I should, I’m hoping to get a buddy for my exploration with Twitter (and other social media).
My New Media 11 class is engaged in a great inquiry about data, privacy, and social media and I’ve upped the ante by requiring them to have a specific target audience, 45 members of whom must give them feedback on their message. You should have seen their faces when they realized they couldn’t just slap it together for the unimportant audience of Ms Bell. After a few minutes, they started to putting together ideas and got into it. I know that having students reach authentic audiences helps them to improve the quality of their work. I think I had never really required it to happen before, certainly not in such a large audience. Now I am faced with the challenge of how do I ethically and safely get them to reach these authentic audiences without casting them to the trolls of social media. Buddy time! My two thoughts here are to buddy up with our district technology person. She likely has some great ideas, and hopefully a lot of knowledge about what our district’s parameters and policies are about using these kinds of platforms. I’m also hoping to buddy up with a local journalist who does a lot of his work on Twitter and has faced some pretty horrible trolls. Also, any of you lovely people reading this blog, please give me your ideas!
Jumping in to the deep end. This is where I seem to spend a lot of learning time. You think I’d learn by now. Planning would be good, but I seem to be far more inclined to fly by the seat of my pants. Thankfully, I’ve learned to swim. Actually, I think I like the challenge. For instance, we’ve decided to change how chromebooks, the library computers & tables, and labs get booked, but we couldn’t find a utility that really worked with school schedules. The computer teacher at another school made up this amazing Google Spreadsheet, and I took on the task of changing it to fit our school – I had no real idea of what I was getting myself into!
I’ve learned far more about spreadsheets than I had ever hoped to learn! But I’m pretty proud of my efforts to sort out this puzzle. Like all good inquiries in life, I figured it out because it was something I really wanted to learn. It took quite a while last year, and then we changed how we’re organizing the chromebooks again, so more tinkering. However, it’s the continual tinkering and using what I learned by jumping into the deep end that has helped me remember how to manipulate and adapt this spreadsheet. I could not have created it, and my hat is eternally off to the teacher who shared this with us! Constantly it reminds me that I have to practice what I’ve learned, or I’ll forget it as fast as I forget the names of my students from last semester.
Of course, there’s one final step to keeping and honing tech skills: become someone else’s buddy. There’s no point watching someone else jump into the deepend (unless they want to), when I can share what I’ve learned. Pay It Forward. What a great story and an excellent idea! I always find that by sharing ideas, mine get stretched into different directions and that makes them far richer.