Teacher Bytes

Recently Cathy Jo Nelson, author of the Techno Tuesday blog wrote a post entitled “Do you recognize these southern voices?” In this blog post Cathy lists several blogs from South Carolina she recommends everyone should read for a variety of reasons. I am honored that my blog is included in this select list. More importantly, Cathy reminded me that blogging is a network community in which we can share, laugh, cry, rant, praise, inform, and educate about our passions. I did not recognize all the bloggers on her list but you can be sure I will be checking them out.

Thanks Cathy!

There is a moment that is almost every teacher’s nightmare. That moment that has sweat pouring from the forehead like a golf course’s watering system. That moment when the heart rate rises faster than a rocket. That moment teachers dread: a question from a student you cannot answer. Some teachers handle this moment better than others, deftly deflecting the inquiry with a subtle changing of the subject. Other teachers resort to the “sit down and be quiet” card. The problem is that teachers who must maintain order in a class and feel they must be the dispensers of all knowledge, cannot know everything because the information is growing too fast.

This moment happened to me today when Stephanie asked what I thought was an easy question: how do you embed a YouTube video into Edublogs? Easy, until I realize that Edublog does not work like Blogger which I have more experience with. All you had to do was just highlight, copy, and paste the embedded HTML code from YouTube into the HTML of your blog post and you have embedded video. Easy, except I found out it does not work that way in Edublogs. I tried everything I could think of to no avail. Nothing like failing to do something with a 6th grader eagerly looking up to you to give her knowledge. Don’t I look like the fool.

To call what came next a rescue would be debatable by some teachers. Another student, Zach, spoke up and told me he had embedded a YouTube video into his blog. He calmly explained that he clicked the yellow button on the tool bar on the Write Post page. He further went to tell me about how he copied and pasted the video’s URL into the box that opens by clicking on the yellow button. I tried it and despite every instinct telling me otherwise, it worked (Cathy Nelson you can stop snickering now). Zach actually looked sheepish when his tip worked. Obviously he was unsure how I would take the fact that he knew something his all-powerful teacher did not know. I just smiled and thanked Zach for doing a good job for teaching me something. I further explained that part of the class was for use to learn from each other and that he would be expected to teach teachers how to do some of the things we are learning in our class. The smile on his face showed it all.

The lesson to be learned  is that teachers should not be afraid to admit they don’t know something, especially with technology. With the Digital Native – Digital Immigrant divide we are going to have to realize we can and have to learn from each other. With an unpredictable future, the ability for students to learn things on their own and then teach us what they learn will actually help them be successful.