Can We Become Masters Of New Things

Today, I was wondering if I could make screencasts of the information that I have shared in professional development sessions. I had always been afraid of trying to screencast. I thought it would be too difficult, but it simply is not. I used Jing to create it and it was incredibly easy.

This is a testiment to what I am reading about in "The Element". We are never too old to learn anything if we really have a passion for it.

This is the link for my first screencast Zamzar Demonstration

It shows someone how to upload and convert a video using Zamzar.com.

How Are You Intelligent?

I was listening to "The Element" again this morning while exercising (I works perfectly now, so I think fate was leading me back to listening to it again). Ken Robinson make an interesting distinction between asking, "How intelligent are you?" and "How are you intelligent?". The first question assumes that there are limits to intelligence and that they can and should be quantified. The second assumes that everyone has intelligence and does not make any assumptions about limits. I plan to ask the first question about intelligence on my first day of my web development class. I want the students to begin to question the assumption about how we discuss, measure and limit the intelligence of others. Then, I want to use the entire year, to help them find their own intelligence and express it in beautiful ways. Is that utopian? Maybe, nevertheless, it is a goal worth pursuing.

How This Blog Began

I am creating this blog because of an error I kept getting on my iPod. I had downloaded "The Element" by Sir Ken Robinson as an audiobook. Every time I tried to listen to it, the book would start over after about 20 minutes. This became increasingly frustrating, and I decided to stop listening to the book.

However, today I decided to start listening from the beginning of the book to see if there was "anything that I had missed". That is what is changing everything. The book begins with the story of three people who found their passion in life by finding "their element". All three stories showed how school was actually an impediment to people finding their element.

I am teaching a new class in the Fall 2009 called web development, but it should really be entitled, "Find Your Element Using Web2.0 Tools". I plan to make the entire class about helping students discover their passions and then using web2.0 tools to unleash the talents associated with those passions. Along the way, I hope to use their discoveries to help other teachers understand the value of web2.0 tools and their ability to transform education into a more dynamic and joyous adventure for their students and themselves.