Jigsaws or Lego?

As my regular reader already knows, over the last few months I have been immersing myself in the world of technology. I have gone from technological Neanderthal to, not quite homo sapien (more like Australopithecus) in this time.

Example: I used to think Facebook was good but now I know better and am a dedicated twitterite.

With the help of lots of other teachers, most of them very helpful internet strangers, I have created my own PLN and I am really getting into all this technology stuff in a big way. I’m not yet at the “look what I am doing with my students and all this technology” stage, but I am not far off.

Last week I read “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” by Will Richardson. I’ve been following him on twitter and reading his blog for a while and, basically, living in awe of the man, thinking he was a genius. And so he is. The book is amazing and explains in layman’s terms how to do everything mentioned on the cover.

Then, via Joe Dale's excellent blog, I read José Picardo’s Box of Tricks pages, in particular the “podcasting in 5 easy steps”. His 5 minute tutorial was brilliant. I even skipped some of it because I already know how to use Audacity (I taught myself years ago– it is that easy!). It was the desktop to podcast advice which I found extremely constructive. Muchas gracias!
I am now fiddling about with this and hope to have something out in the ether quite soon. Watch this space.

Then, today, I was re-reading the new National Curriculum for KS3 (I’m not hyperlinking it, you wouldn’t enjoy it!). Words like MOTIVATION and CREATIVITY stand out from the pages like a City scarf in the Stretford End.


It seems that, over time, most teachers, including myself, are going to have to make some subtle changes to a lot of what we do. I'm not saying that my colleagues and I are dinosaurs, far from it. We haven’t done anything wrong, we are just not using the correct tools.

We are giving our students jigsaws when they need Lego!