Following is a preview of the keynote address for Place & The Digital Native: Using Technology & Social Media to Teach the Hudson Valley, Tuesday to Thursday, July 26-28, 2011. Walk-ins welcome.
Once upon a time, in 2007, a colleague down the hall made a bet with me, challenging me to start a teaching blog. I laughed at him.
"Who on earth," I asked him incredulously, "would be interested in what I
had to say?" But I needed him to go do some work with me with inner
city kids, so I made starting the blog contingent upon his
participation, and he agreed. (In this way school is not much different
from, say, Congress, although teachers are usually bargaining for
doughnuts.)
It had begun.
Two years later, my blog was receiving hundreds of hits a month; I had
started a Twitter and a Facebook account; and I had acquired the crown
jewel of technophilia, a smartphone. Things were going very smoothly
with me and technology, thank you very much -- until one night in the
fall.
My daughter, who was seven at the time, asked me to read a book to her
before she went to bed -- this was a nightly ritual. I was in the middle
of drafting a post, checking my feeds, and surfing through other
education blogs, and I said to her -- I remember this verbatim: "No
problem, sweetie. Hang on a second."
The next time I looked up, it was 10:30 PM, over two hours later. She had fallen asleep waiting for me to finish.
I don't mean to imply here that this scary black-hole experience is the
defining interaction that we, or our students, have with social media --
it doesn't have to be. But it was the impetus for me to start thinking
much more critically about how technology changes us, our world and the
classroom.
That's what I'll be talking about in the opening session -- my journey
as a teacher to understand the impact of technology on my teaching. I
also happen to be a crunchie-granola girl by nature, so I have some
native interest in the issues of place and place-based ed and how they
intersect here.
I'm no expert; but I think that might be the aspect of my journey that
will end up being the most useful to you, the conference participant.
Do come. I'd love to see you.
An 11-year veteran of ESL and ELA classrooms, Dina Strasser is a NYS
Master Teacher and former Fulbright Scholar. Her blog, The Line, was named one of the top ten education blogs of 2010 by the Washington Post.
Dina has also written for The New York Times, London Times Online, and
the Association for Supervision and Curricular Development.
She currently teaches
middle school outside Rochester.
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