If you have lingered for just a short while at either Plurk, Twitter, Blog Posts, or Magazine Articles, you will see that our peers in Ed Tech have very strong feelings and often have no problem verbalizing those beliefs.
Whether it is Interactive White Boards, is it a blog or is it a post, games/cell phones in the classroom, filtering options, or more -- you can always find someone who feels strongly and often, because of that strong feeling, has often alienated, dismissed, or ridiculed others who do not share the same belief.
Now, in no way am I saying that we, as educators, should be wishy washy and waver on that which we believe but I also believe that we need to unite on things that are truly important and perhaps provide a bit of flexibility on things that are personal preference.
One of my favorite quotations is from Augustine ""In Essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love"
(Perhaps, in our case, if you allow me......we can change the "in all things" from love to WISDOM.)
Using this quote as a spring board -- what are our essentials, our foundations, our beliefs that we all would believe to be true regardless of classroom, teacher, or students?
My short list of essentials are:
a. We believe that teachers are also learners
b. We believe that we can no longer teach the same way we were taught.
c. We believe that the opportunities offered through technology cannot be dismissed as fads.
d. We believe that we are not alone and that collaboration and communication is available to assist you always.
e. We believe that students cannot be boxed into one size fits all and to stifle their creativity juices is wrong.
My short list of non-essentials are:
a. Interactive White Boards
b. Mac vs PC
c. Daniel Pink
d. Back-channel protocol
e. Protect or not protect twitter, facebook, plurk, etc.
Neither of these lists are complete -- in fact, they are quite short because I want you to add your thoughts on what you believe are our essentials or non-essentials.
What can we agree to agree on and what can we agree to not agree on?
But more importantly, in all things....to show wisdom.
I invite your thoughts.
Jen
You can also read this post at: http://jenuinetech.com/blog/?p=1341
