Revisiting the Beginning

I have been in many different teacher-leader roles role in the last several years. These include TAT Team, MED Committee, GLC, CTL, Mentor, and several other positions in my school community. One year I was on SEVEN different committees! What I never, ever thought I would be was a teacher-leader in technology. It's been very interesting and humbling having different teachers come to me asking for help with different technologies. But what's been even more surprising is the fact that I know, or can figure out, how to help them!

I think that being a teacher-leader is just that: a teacher who takes their time to help someone else. In the digital age, it adds to the responsibilities of the teachers; not only are we expected to do all the same stuff as always, such as teach, manage the classroom, make sure they learn, on and on, but now we have the added responsibility of adding technology to our repertoire. That means we can't get into a rut and teach the same things over and over and over. That means taking more time to learn things on our own time. For some teachers, technology is an easy thing to do. For me, on the other hand, it is a relearning process each time I do something with any significant amount of time in between sessions. This blog, for instance. Every single time I get on here I have to reacquaint myself with how to edit or create a new blog, or even get to the page that has the URL. Every. Single. Time. Heck, I even lost this blog once and spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out where to find it! But the good thing is, I CAN relearn, and I can figure things out that I couldn't before.

A big bummer about writing the scope and sequence/unit/lesson plan that I chose, science, is that in a year or two it will all be null and void. Our curriculum is completely changing. The only thing that we will keep from the science I have taught for the last 9 years is heat. That's it. And only thermal heat. No moon phases, microorganisms, space, waves, anything! I am so bummed about that! But, the good thing is that I have learned how to incorporate technology into my science curriculum. And, since we will be starting from scratch, I can build technology into it from the beginning!

That is what I can take from this course this semester.