The highlight of my NCCAT week was really a culmination of all the tremendous and varied technology that is “out there” for kids and teachers. Wow! The things our kids can do with media now is just phenomenal and I quickly realized that I will have to be at least a short hop ahead in order to provide for their needs. Saying that…in order to make even a percentage of these activities possible for our kids, changes will have to occur. Teachers will have to rewire their thinking to provide classroom spaces and attitudes to accommodate new teaching methods, schools and school districts will have to step up to provide the hard/soft ware needed to make these possibilities into probabilities, families will need to become active with the new ways of thinking. That is a lot of change! Change can be scary, so I guess the REAL impact I got from my week at NCCAT was the glimpse of how schools will be changing…as a result of the technology. Even the river event was an example of change for me. I attended an NCCAT in (I think) 2000 called “Nurturing the Nurturer” where we also rode the river. Since this time had more water due to recent rainfall, the change in the size of the final plunge was terrific for me! It was quick, kind of scary and unpredictable, and nothing like it was before…hmmm….is that kind of like technology???
Onward…