OMG – so much to do, where to now?

I am really enjoying the articles, websites and blogs that I have been reading but there is no way I can read and give all my attentions to all that I read.  I am not a great reader anyway but this is really difficult and frustrating because I am keen to read as much as possible, but short of giving up hockey, cooking, speaking to my partner and everything else I am not going to read everything.

A perfect example is Richard Byrne, he tweets some amazingly interesting stuff that is on his blog, he tweets so much and so often that I will never be able to read all of his tweets let alone read all that is on his blog.  I am truly struggling, nearly everything I read has some relevance, somethings I know are just information, some are things I want to do but many more are the things I need to investigate further to see how they best fit the things I am currently doing.

I certainly need to prioritise: the whole school projects, using Google as a VLE, BYOD and general infrastructure information; the things I want to do with my teaching and the things that I can share with the other staff at the school so that they will be more comfortable using the technology in the school; and the things of interest, not absolutely essential but could be.

It is the middle group that is pressing, I had a conversation with a parent yesterday because his child had produced her work at home but was upset when she went to present in class the pictures had not come with her.  We had a long discussion where he wanted me to tell him what platform we were advocating and to ensure him that the same problem will not happen again.  After some time we got to the point in the discussion where I explained that this is the way of the world and we, as parents and educators, need to teach our kids how to be digital citizens of the world.  This not only means that we teach them responsible and appropriate use of the technology, but also an awareness of different platforms and how to produce work that is accessible on different platforms and that this was not going to be easy especially as many teachers do not have the capacity to do this themselves. At the end of the conversation I felt that I had changed this parent’s view of technology and some of the things that are important when we are teaching using and expecting students to use technology in our classrooms.

And again I see a number of tweets come into my inbox and ask myself what do I read and what is going to help the students and teachers of my school to deliver their lessons and become digital citizens of the world.