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“The most important thing to remember about technology in our classrooms is that it is not about the technology.”  Well it  sounds like something I would say.  It’s what a lot of us are saying. 

Thinkature brings the richness of in-person, visual communication to the web by placing instant messaging inside a visual workspace. Use it as a collaboration environment, a meeting room, a personal web-based whiteboard, or something entirely new.

PHOTO OP (Shockwave, 7 MB) is a two-part interactive activity that introduces you to digital photography and digital photo editing. Use the virtual camera to create snapshots and explore lighting, focus, shutter speed, and compositional effects. After you've taken some photos, switch to the Photo Op editor and transform your pictures into something completely different. This Art Zone interactive is suitable for all ages. Young children will find it easy to take simple snapshots and transform or recolor their virtual photos. More advanced users can create complex artistic compositions by layering, applying filters, and experimenting with various special effects, lighting, and blends. If you need help, scroll down for some hints about how to use the program.  If your Internet connection is slow, allow the program to load fully, then come back to play.

Maybe we need to find common ground among the teachers and administrators at our schools. Take the word “technology” out of the discussion. That word seems to mean too many different things to too many different people (even scare). Maybe we need to be talking about something no one can deny as a priority in our schools: STUDENT LEARNING. Maybe we if we talk on that common ground,  there will be less resistance, more collaboration and communication on how to achieve that.

The conductor of an orchestra does not make a sound…he depends for his power on his ability of making other people powerful.

Darren Kuropatwa and participants from an international PLP cohort collaboratively worked on a presentation titled : Teaching Well.

reasons that I hear all the time about why people do not use technology in K-12 education

Do not let students try a technological tool until you are totally proficient with it yourself. Better not to introduce something than do so and risk revealing that you do not know all. You are the sole purveyor of knowledge.

The first is that effort is more important than talent

In fact, almost every successful individual or organization puts in at least 10,000 hours of practice first, which averages out to about four hours a day for ten years, he estimates.

The second lesson educators could learn from Fleetwood Mac's success is the importance of a compensation strategy, rather than a capitalization strategy. In other words, instead of building on successes, the band became better and more successful because they put their energy into compensating for their weaknesses, he said.

Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. "Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception," says de Bono.

Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict sense, but doing so is a good exercise in stretching ourselves and really beginning to think differently about visuals and design in our everyday professional lives.

Kanso (簡素) Simplicity or elimination of clutter.