The rants are great…and you did display great tact in your answer. I enjoyed the presentation (and Darren’s TATN presentation) and I’m building next year’s budget for my campus with Inspired classrooms in mind.

1) start reading three blogs of your choice on a regular basis
2) respond to those blogs on a regular basis

That’s it - no need to start writing a book or get yourself into all of the intricacies (dangit - I’m going to LEAVE that misspelled in protest of not having Firefox!!!) of Web 2.0

It’s a nice way of saying - ‘take responsibility for your own learning’ without ticking someone off.

The sad thing is, the people that need to hear it won’t read it. It is my experience that a good to great teacher understands that the laptop is a tool, and uses it to further their own learning as well as the learning of their students and co-workers. The less inspired teacher uses other people to manage their technology, so as not to have to learn too much new stuff. That eventually brings about this simulated dialog:

Other: Goodness, my students just don’t want to learn. I’ve used all sorts of new Web-School-Thinking-2-Point-Oh, but all they want to do is chat. They don’t want to work. They just want to be told what to do so they can complain about it. I wish the administration would tell us how to fix that.

Me: You should blog.

That isn’t to say that blogging fixes all problems, but it does help you get out of your skin and collect a wider variety of solutions, just like I want my students to have.

Along the same lines as the previous topic… I was wondering if you would give your thoughts on this topic.

http://musingsfromtheacademy.wordpress.com/2007/01/11/digital-writing-vs-handwriting/