New Year - New Tech Strategy - Week 1

With the beginning of the New Year, we all make some resolutions that we want to make this year a bit better than the last.  I am no different in this regard, I tweeted this afternoon that my New Year's Resolutions were to Tweet once a day, Blog once a week and to work on being healthier by joining Steve Dembo's Fit42 Fitness Challenge.  I am hopeful that I will be able to achieve all of these goals.  In the Blogging arena, I am going to resurrect this blog.  I had posted regularly between 2005 and 2008, but when I took the position as the Administrative Vice Principal at Woodside High School, it left me little time to blog.

 I have continued to present at a variety of Education Conferences in California and I have done some presentations for CUE, in their CUE to You program.  I was also elected to the CUE Board of Directors in April 2010, so I have continued to be very active in the EdTech community, but I have been less on the cutting-edge than I had been in the past and I realized that I very much miss the implementation of new and emerging technologies in the educational process and having conversations with my colleagues, local and around the world.  I am hopeful that this blog will allow me to jump back into the conversation and re-engage with all of you.

With that said..... here we go!

One of my rallying cries over the past several years has been to increase the amount of technology that is used as part of the educational process.  I have been a huge proponent of this since the mid-1990's.  I have always had to deal with some teachers that refused to integrate technology into their classes for a myriad of reasons.  One of which was always access and the other was that because they were "seasoned" teachers they couldn't learn how to use technology like their younger counterparts.  Teachers in this group typically held up copies of Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," as a justification of their position.  While I think that Marc Prensky is an intelligent man, I want to let him know that while he may have just identified behavior that he observed in educational settings, he set the integration of technology into education back at least 5 years.  I know that there are other factors that come into play, including: unions, finances, professional development, standards, NCLB, etc., but the "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" gave teachers the easy out.

Next week.... Access, Access - 2011 is going to be the year when we get so close to "ubiquitous access" and there won't be any more excuses.