Late January is often a time when I reflect on my performance in the classroom the previous year and think about what I might do differently.  During the last few years, I have been determined to try at least one new technology ‘thing’ and see what effect it has on my classroom teaching.  Last year, I made a concerted effort to get my students involved in wikis, and I podcasted all of my Year 12 Software Development theory classes.  Did it have an effect?  I’m not sure what the best way of measuring this would be – however, the majority of my students really got into the wikis and many had my podcasts on their ipods and were listening to my theory classes as part of their exam preparation.    I had hoped for one of my senior students to achieve a perfect study score – but this did not happen (maybe this year?).  Although I was disappointed about this at first, the performance of my whole class put this in perspective for me.  I have always had large senior classes and last year was no exception.  However, for the first time 78% of the students in my class achieved a study score over 40 (placing them in the top 8% of the state).  Was this due to the changes that I had made?  I taught the course in roughly the same way as I usually do – so possibly.  Perhaps the biggest effect was on those students on the fringes – who were able to access content from my classes in a number of different forms and take some time to understand and interpret it?  It’s all speculation really, but having had the initial success with these tools – I will keep on using them as they (and my teaching) evolves.  

So what’s new on the horizon for this year? 

 I know teachers and students around the world have been vodcasting for some time, but this year I will begin my first foray into this (sometimes trivial) genre.  I have decided to make use of TeacherTube and upload videos for my classes (and anyone else who is interested) to make use of.  Depending on how that goes, I will possibly get some of students to do the same (I had an idea for some student panel discussions – but it remains to be seen as to whether I can interest them in doing it). 

I also plan to make use of some student blogging using the excellent Edublogs web-site (of which you are no doubt familiar with!)

 If you haven’t seen the thought provoking video clip created by Michael Wesch titled ‘A Vision of Students Today’, then I suggest you seek it out and have a look.  In it, Michael explores the landscape of the modern classroom, our place in it and the ways in which students are engaged (or otherwise).  With so many things competing for the attention of our students, we need to be both resourceful and willing to embrace new and interesting tools in order that we can compete.  However, the video does not preach that we need to adopt these technologies or risk not engaging our students.  We could certainly all create MySpace and FaceBook pages and chat with our students on MSN – however, this would not necessarily give us a better chance of creating a dynamic learning community.  In actual fact, launching ourselves full tilt into these domains so heavily populated by digital natives could make us look like we are trying too hard.  There may be no argument that the ‘digital natives’ are the masters of the technology, and we are ‘on the fringe’, however, they are not the masters of their own learning.  This is where we can place ourselves – and we can do so effectively by utilising those technologies that we can reasonably harness in the time we have available and in the context of what we are trying to achieve.