Part of being a teacher, I sincerely believe is learning as much and maybe more from our failures in the classroom as opposed to our success. My philosophy has always been I will try something once, whether it is a new type of food, a new driving route to work, or a new restaurant or shopping center. I believe in giving everything at least one shot to prove it is better than what I have been doing before, and it is this same philosophy that I have carried into my classroom. The only problem with this philosophy is that sometimes learning form your mistakes can be a difficult and painful process and one that often I question if I want to repeat. Integrating more and more technology in my classroom has given me both some amazing successes and some horrifying crash and burn failures, but I press forward. One thing that I have always found helpful when trying to overcome my technology defeats is talking to someone else who has also been through a similar experience and figuring out how they handled or did things differently, So, in my quest to wiki expertise, I decided to also look for a way to validate my failures and I found this wonderful bog that is aptly entitled, “My Brilliant Failure”. It is posted on a really interesting website, Kairosnews: A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy. This is a really interesting forum where tons of discussion is occurring about research, experience, and observations about technology and a lot about wikis in general. I think being part of a community of people working on and researching similar ideas is important for changing the face of teaching and learning. I truly believe that wiki and blogs and other social interactive software are changing our classrooms whether we are involved or not. All of my students have a MySpace or Facebook account, so whether we like it or not teachers need to bone up on their technology knowledge and be prepared for the classroom change that is coming. This article “My Brilliant Failure” highlighted how not allowing enough control over a wiki content limits learning and the effectiveness of the tool, which I thought was a good observation. However, I chose to blog about this site this week more for the fact that there is a place for discussion and venting about technology and rhetoric and composition, where you can receive feedback and opinions. Plus it made me feel better to see someone else dealing with a brilliant failure, although I don’t think I could call many of my failures brilliant.
Kairosnews: http://kairosnews.org/node/3794
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2 comments:
Megan,
I liked your thoughts on the article and how you think about teaching. One can sit on the fence and comment about how a process or a technology is not appropriate or too easy to implement. Without trying it yourself you cannot really judge it's usefulness. I admire your similar views in application of technology to the teaching environment. I liked reading through the blog since it the author admitted to mistake of making wiki not completely editable. The first step in learning a new technology is trying it and accepting your failures. Great views and thoughts Megan!
-Amey
Megan,
You blog was well-written. I love your style of writing. We learn so much from our mistakes. I get frustrated with teachers at our school who do not use the tools we have available to our students. We hae laptops for every student at our school, yet many teachers are afraid to incorporate these into their classrooms. I will share this blog you found withsome of the teachers I work with and hopefully we can all learn something about making meanings out of our mistakes.
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