C4T 3

The cyberworld can be just as ironic as real life can be. I happily posted my first comment to my C4T at Connected Principals regarding a blog entry by Dov Emerson entitled A Twitter Visit in Real Life. When I went back to post the second comment, I discovered the site temporarily down (still is). I panicked a bit; contacted EDM310 help and got another spot to use for my second post so I could do my summary by April 1. Because I am so paranoid, I had kept his entry and my comment in a doc file. It belatedly occurred to me (sorry, Dr. Strange) that perhaps Emerson had his own blog. He does! Now, if I had just remembered to breathe, I might have figured this out without having to bother the EDM310 staff.

Emerson started twitting as have so many of us to connect with friends and family. He happened upon @NMHS_Principal, aka Eric Sheninger, principal of New Milford High School in New Jersey. Emerson began to follow Sheninger and those Shenigner followed and who followed Sheninger (did you get all that?). That twitter lead to a real time visit to the New Milford High School and the opportunity to sit down with Sheninger and talk about ED Tech tools and their place in education. How much to use, and how best to utilize them. Of all the real-life applications Emerson found at the school, one really impressed me. Sheninger gives his faculty members an opportunity to pursue their own ideas about technological possibilities, and then share them with others. Now that's educating everyone involved in educating. What excited Emerson was how one twitter post lead to an amazing ED Tech adventure. As I become more comfortable with the technology itself, and connect to others in the education field, I too find a marvelous world of teaching skills I will bring to my classroom.

Since that site went down, I was redirected here. Now this was a subject I could wrap my head around. Is the lecture method effective? Should it be discredited? Has its time come and gone? Citing several sources, Dr. Strange posed some thoughtprovoking questions about the method and its place (or lack thereof) in our current educational system. I myself was mostly taught via the lecture method and experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly along the way. For me the appealing part of lecturing is controlling the class; boring them could be considered a form of self-discipline learning. However, I think it is more of acknowledging its time has come and gone. Students today enter the classroom capable of multitasking and ready to use their tech savvy tools for learning or whatever else they can find to do. Demanding the kind of control and authority respect the lecture method offered is no longer applicable. To educate today, you have to be a different kind of leader, a different kind of teacher. Is there a place for a different kind of lecture method? Absolutely. And I have a feeling we as today's educators of tomorrow's leaders will need to know how to save the baby and throw out just the bathwater.