Friday, December 7, 2007

reflection

Earlier this week, while I was teaching my Culture of the 60's class and showing a YouTube video on my SmartBoard, one of my students said to me, "Can you imagine teaching without that thing?"(referring to the SmartBoard).
I paused for a minute and thought: no, I can't imagine it. And yet, I did it for 12.5 of the 15 years that I've been teaching. I taught for years without powerpoint, YouTube, taking my students directly to a webpage, then following links; without email, LiveJournal, blogs, wikis, turnitin.com, social networks...so much of the stuff I do now I never was able to do, and yet I still managed to run a class. It blows my mind how much technology and web 2.0 specifically has altered the way I deliver instruction. And of course, I needed one of my students to point that out to me.

Wow.