On+Technology's+gifts+to+me

April 1, 2011 One thing about working with technology is, that unless you're taking a class or have a tech savvy friend you can call on when things don't work as they should, you are on your own. With technology when you hit a snag there is no clear direction as to how to fix it; there are no reference manuals or flow charts. If you don't have the moxie to try -- as soon as you hit those initial roadblocks you will simply throw up your hands in frustration. In that way working with technology has been good for me. It has forced me to 'get tough or die' as Johnny Cash once said. The thing is. If the rewards were not equal to the pain then there is no incentive to learn, to push. But what I have come to discover is that the rewards are good -- and numerous.

April 6, 2011, During my break I had the chance to meet up with a good friend. One comment he made during our conversation stuck with me. He told me, in effect, not to lean too hard on those aspects of my personality that are least in my gifts/skill set. @ the time he felt it was my organizational skills that were on the lowest rung; upon relfection I realized it is in fact my 'risk taking'/'do it' side that is the weakest link. This makes a big difference. Knowing what your working with is HUGE when you are trying to be effective in realms that challenge you (such as the implementation and maintenance of a program). The epifany for me was to realize that the aspect needed to delegate then was not the organization of what we're doing but the implementation and maintenance components. And that's where it got interesting...

April 12-11 The suprise for me was to see the immediate impact on their sense of ownership for their learning. As I went through the checklists they started to suggest that they could actually do more than one page per day. As we went through the checklist and printed it out it became THEIR checklist. Quite remarkable. My weakness opened up an opportunity for them to gain a new strength -- of purpose and focus. One book we read as a staff last year talked about how to increase student ownership of their learning. It was something I agreed with and have tried to do in the past; here a door opened to this world and I could see more of this happening. When I started to record their Math and Reading on Evernote it happened again. More on that later...