My Advice?

I was excited and flattered when an instructor emailed me to ask if she could interview me for a class she is teaching about being a technology integration specialist. Since it is a class early on in the program it mostly covers what it means to be an integration specialist - what skills are involved and such. So the questions were pretty much what I expected: What would you say are your major responsibilities? What is a typical day like as an integration specialist? (This was the hardest question to answer as no two days are alike.) What advice do you have for those looking to become technology integration specialists? It is this last question that was both the easiest and I feel most important question she could have asked. And these are the main points of my answer:

• Expand your Professional Learning Network (PLN) - I learn SO MUCH when I take time to read my RSS feeds and just "listen" to the education talk that occurs on sites like Twitter. 
• Be approachable, but not a door mat. - It is important that the educators and students you support know that you will help them when they need it, but don't do the work for them. If needs support keep your hands off of their computer if at all possible. This may possibly be one of the hardest things I had to learn because "I can do it faster." But, if you fix the problems for them, they will come back again expecting you to fix another problem and won't ever learn the skills themselves.
• Don't let your work take over your life. - It is so easy to sit down "for just a few minutes" with your computer in the evening and then realize that two hours have passed. One of my favorite aspects of my job is that I get to explore the internet for new tools and exciting ways to use them in the classroom. But this can be very time consuming and can cause you to feel overwhelmed if you are not careful.

There were of course a number of other things I could have said, but I felt these were some of the biggest ideas that I wanted to convey.  And of course as soon as I publish this post there will be even more that I wished I had added.


Image courtesy of Flickr and laughlin

Kansas Roads More Important than Education?

I just saw on local news channel KWCH that Reader's Digest ranked the roads in Kansas number one in the nation, which was of course followed by an interview with an official from the Kansas Department of Transportation telling folks why we shouldn't have to cut any money out of the KDOT budget next year. That we would certainly drop from the prestigious rank of #1 if we were to cut the KDOT budget.

At the same time, the district where I work is looking at having to cut somewhere around $25 MILLION from our budget for next year - and that's just one district. Top that with the fact that the state has already been delinquent making payments to school districts a number of times this year and it leads to some potentially terrifying implications for our education system in Kansas.

Now it may be that I am biased because I am an educator, but it seems to me a really easy way to get more money into the education budget would be to move some of the money from the KDOT budget over to the education budget. I know as a Americans we are taught that it we must be number one (think how many times the medal count was displayed on NBC during the Olympics) but as a Kansan I am really okay with letting our road conditions slide down the list a bit if that means our students can continue to get the educations they deserve.

Image courtesy of Flickr and TheDphotography.