Celebrating Success 1: 21st Century at Confed.

The other day I felt quite down about our rate of progress towards becoming a 21st century school. Change in schools can be slow, perhaps more than other industries. We had a quick staff meeting where our technology group was given a short period of time to show staff how to set up an RSS feed or google reader. We wanted time to get every staff person to create their own. I really felt that if we just talked to them, no one would carry through and program their own feed. Not enough time and nobody interested. I wanted everybody to use the feed to assist them in their professional learning, just as I use mine.

The next day, one of our wonderfully gifted resource room teachers came into my room and wanted help setting up a google reader. My intern helped her to do that in a few minutes. I told her that she could now subscribe to this very blog as a start. She explained that she had susbscribed to my class blog instead! At first I was disappointed.

I then realized the beauty of her idea. Three times a week she comes into our room to help children with the writing process. Much of the writing we do is blogging. (learn, communicate, build a learning network) By setting up an RSS feed to our blog, every time a student writes something it is sent to her reader and she can comment, encourage and collaborate with students almost instantaneously! The beauty of the idea is that I didn't even think of it before.

An ingenious idea which was not possible until the age of technology. The students win as they increase their readership, the teachers win because the technology makes their job easier.

I'm looking forward to celebrating more successful steps to becoming a 21st century school!