In the beginning....

I have always been interested in the available and current technologies that could and should be used in teaching/learning. This year the state of Nebraska succumbed to the federal pressure it's exerting on all 50 states and "revised" all the state standards. They do, finally, address students' need to know how to use technology, including social networking software. So...here I am blogging; I have a MySpace page, a Facebook account, and an iPhone. OK. I'm a Mac Addict, so it was a no-brainer that I'd get an iPhone. I'm working on revising my curriculum (we also adopted new textbooks this summer) to incorporate some of this. Unfortunately, the district's tech policies block social networking sites. I'm not even completely sure that my students will be able to log into this blog site. At least we're trying.

I'm also trying to make this a successful endeavor for myself as both a teacher and a writer. From here I hope to post my own work--poetry, essays, short stories--and have a version that gets my students writing about our classroom conversations and their responses to literature assignments. Teaching is always an experiment...collections of experiments, actually. Some of them are successful. Others...not so much. We'll see how this goes.