Friday, April 09, 2010

STOP and THINK: What inspires you?

Have you ever had the kind of busy week that can be characterized by an overflowing email inbox? I've got emails that I haven't even read from 3 days ago! That's what my week has been. Well, one of them was a question from a colleague that made me STOP and THINK:

What about education inspires you? Why do you blog about it?

For me it's simple. I like seeing a student get excited about learning. That's it in a nutshell. That is my inspiration.

I've been in the business long enough to know that students rarely get excited anymore with standard lectures where all they do is watch the instructor at the front of the class. Students need to learn by doing. Teachers have a challenge here though because many teachers do not fully appreciate how the students of today *do* things. For example, how they are attached to their cell phone, how they text message with their friends/family fifty times a day, how they use online social networks and how they do 'research' and 'multitask' on the Internet. Therefore, the logical response to this situation is that teachers need learn how the students of today do things. Many teachers need to learn more about the ever-changing realm of instructional technology so that they can better formulate ways to leverage it as a motivating factor for students. If a teacher motivates a student to get excited about their own learning then everyone wins! I'm inspired by that almost every day - that's why I write my blog. It's an online chronicle of some of the tasty tidbits that inspire me from an educational technology perspective.

What do you think? What inspires you?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Through education, you firstly learn *how* to ask questions that are key to understanding something, i.e. how to combat a particular disease. Secondly, through education you learn how you might try to answer those questions. When you start answering some of life's most troublesome dilemmas, that's significant. That's what inspires me.