Am I a Connected Educator?

After reading the first two chapters of The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, I feel a bit discouraged. As if I already didn't have enough things to do during and after my workday, now I have two authors encouraging me to add to my workload.

I have to say that my initial response after reading their "A Day in the Life of a Connected Educator" on pages 20 and 21 of the book was frustration with myself. In their example, they had Susan, an elementary teacher, spending her school day (amongst other things) helping her students Skype with other students in Iceland, tagging images her students uploaded to a Flickr account, and Tweeting the principal. My first thought was, how does she ever find the time in her busy, tech-filled day to teach her kids to read and write? And do her students just carry around their smartphones all day? My school uses a 1 to 1 laptop program for Grades 5 and up, and for many boys, the moment they get any free time, they are online playing games. It became such a problem in Grade 5, that students must lock their laptops in a teacher's cabinet when they are not being used in a class assignment.

Perhaps they are just trying to add as many tech possibilities into their scenario that they can, but it makes me disheartened to think that perhaps I am not adequately adding technology into the lives of my students. Even though in the past school year, my students:

1. Designed movies to animate a language arts story using Xtranormal.

2. Skyped with me while I was in Italy for three days. I even designed a website using Weebly for students to use while I was away. 

3. Used Gaggle email accounts I created so that they could email pen pals in Florida.

4. created presentations with Keynote and Prezi; practiced math and reading skills at BrainNook, retrieved their spelling lists from SpellingCity, and used a SmartBoard in class every day.

I know I can do more, but I still feel as though I need to teach these students basic skills so that they can be more effective using these modes of technology (especially reading and writing skills). At the start of this school year, I told a student to just "Go to www.prezi.com" without thinking, and so he typed into the address bar: wwwdotpressydotcom. My error, of course, was telling this to a new KIS student. It wasn't a problem for the students who were in Grade 2 last year; they received at least two classes of direct instruction tech time per week.

And as for collaboration versus cooperation, as based upon Beach and Hall's Venn diagram on page 13, I can assure you that at school this week, we are feeling the loss of the Grade 1 teacher. She will still be recovering in the hospital until Wednesday from her wrist surgery; even though we are using a spreadsheet I set up with a schedule in Google drive, "if a group member leaves, the work will suffer." She spent the week either in pain or on pain killers, and so she was unable to contribute to the planning as much as my colleague in Grade 2 and I would have liked. So I'm responsible for her Commonwealth Day lessons for tomorrow, and it won't be as good as if she had been involved in the process.

So, in response to the question I asked at the top of this post, "Am I a Connected Educator?" I would have to answer, yes, but there are many more things that I can do. Perhaps this class is the impetus that I need to make more connections with technology.