Digital Citizenship - Week Seven

Last week  in my blog I stated how I disliked the reading week as I felt that I was disconnected form the world of education. I had noted that I found myself spending time investigating the many new ideas and concepts coming at me from twitter or my feeder and just how exciting this was for me. This week it was very different. I was on vacation with my Daughter and her family in Disney World. I had every intent on staying connected and carried with me both a laptop and my Ipad for this purpose. I carried both back without ever turning either of them on. I disconnected to be connected. Funny how many people do not even understand the concept of disconnecting to connect. The face to face interaction with my two grandchildren that was occurring moment to moment was the single most important connection at that time. While they were experiencing the sights, sounds and wonders that are Disney, I needed to have one hand in theirs with full focus on each experience instead of both hands on a device, nose down, reading the latest tweet, while life's moments passed by. There was a great interaction between me and them and I enjoyed learning with them and experiencing things with them. I found the proper use of the off button. My biggest lesson this week is balance. Unfortunately I saw way to many parents who do not understand this and wasted great opportunities to spend time with their children.

 I did really enjoy playing with Google documents. I found that it did not work exactly like the Microsoft applications that we are all so familiar with but was close enough that it was very simple to figure out. As an educator this tool would be great for sharing with students. As an administrator I see many applications for working with faculty to develop a new policy or plan as well as then communicating the final document. Finally, I also work on many projects that require a few hands working on the same document and I can not wait to try this out as we build our collaboration project. As an experienced trades person I have made the connection between the new style of learning and apprenticeship years ago. This week feels very much like an apprenticeship. We read and explore a little to guide and then we go and do it. Learning more from the doing and less form the reading.

I found a couple of interesting articles in my feeder this week. The first was on learning as an apprenticeship. It was very interesting how they indicated that people should be shown how to learn by their parents. The very interesting piece for me is that the parents of most individuals who are very successful do just that. They disconnect to connect with their children and interact with them so that they learn and grow. Does not matter whether that disconnection was from a news paper, the telephone (the ones that hung on the wall), the television, our jobs or any of the new ways that we interact on the net, they still disconnected so they can totally connect. The second was on time management. A very important subject for everyone, not just students. We always tend to build our lives on the small things and then try to squeeze in the important ones. Kind of neat way to look at this with some good ideas to explain to students. It does go back to the disconnect to connect idea in that we push out spending time with kids floating on lazy river laughing to answer some text. The one is a small item that can be handled later, the one will only happen now. I guess it is for each person to decide which one is which.

Jeff