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I have to wonder how many folks would jump in at all if they were afraid of the water. As David Truss points out, "too many people fear drowning and never get into the pool” and that in most Teacher Ed programs the amount of technology skill they leave the program with seems to be optional... to me that's like throwing a non-swimmer into the deep end.

I spend a day or two, sometimes a week “teaching folks to swim.” I give them the skills and we go SLOW.

There has been talk in the edtech community for a long time that we need to stop talking about the tools, but I disagree. You are always going to have those non-swimmers who finally find their way to the edge of the pool. Teach them what the water feels like and support them as they develop confidence in using the tool. When I share a tool like voicethread with a teacher, they can see so many ways it can be used in the classroom. They get excited about the potentials but they don’t understand the many concepts that go into it, embedding, and sharing, and privacy, and moderating comments, are so new to them…They are excited about being at the pool's edge, but it is like being thrown into that deep end for the first time.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place and a time for strategic thinking, what I’m saying is that the edublogosphere is loaded to the freakin’ gills with it. How many ways can you discuss the innate digital skills of middle school students before realizing it’s worth more to talk about what works and doesn’t work with them. In this case the why is truly “academic”. We’ve twittered, blogged, bookmarked, tagged, forwarded, and flogged this horse to an amazing degree. What I don’t see is the same amount of energy in capturing what’s been done with the students, the successes and failures, in anything longer than 140 characters. If we want our teachers to learn to fish, we have to show them how to bait the hook and cast the line…not wonder if the fish are truly hungry.

voicethread.com used in first grade classroom so students are participating in asynchronous conversation and everyone gets to share on topic chosen by teacher. Combined with short recordings from audio enhancement classroom system help the teacher quickly post new content from class to the site.