So today I spent some time with @mishelleyb at Southern Nazarene University interacting with Alese Smith and Ray Rose of Rose and Smith Associates. They were working with the faculty at SNU consulting and working on helping them integrate technology into their classrooms. I was fortunate enough to participate in "Take your Husband to Work day" at SNU today so I got to sit in on the sessions today. It was amazing. Just as amazing as Will Richardson's sessions at the OTA Conference. The difference was this: today was a full day, Richardson's presentation was only an hour long. In his defense, I was so impacted by his keynote address, I ended up going to his follow up, one hour, break out session.
So now to the good part: mishelleyb introduced me and told them I use technology in my classroom and I was just along for some faculty development. If you have never seen these two in action, they play off of each other and get the audience involved in their presentation. Apparently, mishelleyb was a big part of the 1st day's presentation, so they decided I was going to be the interactor for today. So the presentation goes on and Ray (or Alese) asked "who uses twitter?" I raised my hand and got called on to share how I thought it could be used in the classroom. I shared. I also shared about Facebooking with my students for homework help (which I think could actually be better served with twitter). Presentation is over, a professor (who also happens to be a mentor) comes up to me and says "how do you have time to twitter and all that? I don't have time to do that!" I was dumbfounded. How do you respond to that? I think he really believes I am just sitting around reading tweets and looking at facebook pictures all day! Really? Really?! mishelleyb's response was classic! "We pretty much make time for the things we want to do", to which he who shall remain nameless wholly took offense.
I feel like I am trying to keep up with current technology in my classroom. This guy was "making video" over the weekend. I (and mishelleyb) want to know what that means! He said he made like 10 hours of video over the weekend. Does that mean he is going to show 10 hours of video? That's 3 weeks of class time in college. I'm just saying. I want to keep up with social networking trends that can be used to truly engage students in the classroom, to try to do things differently than they are being done. Its not that the current way of doing things are not valid, but if you can do something different, WHY NOT?
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