My Technological Journey

          I am fascinated by technology.  I'm interested enough to seek it and comfortable enough that I'll push the buttons and figure it out, but I'm no expert.  In my personal life, I wouldn't say that I'm ahead of the game by any stretch of the imagination. We live in the middle of nowhere so our wifi is limited, meaning everything else is limited too.  We don't use Netflicks.  My son doesn't do XBox Live.  We rarely Skpe or Facetime.  All of those uses are too costly.  Probably the one tech piece that I couldn't live without would be my iPhone.  I always say if I ever lost it, I wouldn't remember when I was supposed to breathe!  Siri enters all of my kids' sporting events in my calendar and reminds me when I need to buy dog food.  I use my phone to check my Twitter account...sometimes, and I burn up my ShopShop app each week when I make the trip to Walmart.  My photos are digital and so are some of my scrapbooks.  I use email and texting often to communicate, collaborate, and share.

          Like many educators, the lines between my personal and professional lives often blur.  I use Twitter, but I probably use it 10 times as much for my educational PLN rather than keeping up with local gossip.  My professional email and texting far outweigh my personal, and most of what I search on the web is somehow related to education.  Because I enjoy it, I've now entered the world of TIS which means technology has changed everything for me.  I now spend most of my day communicating with teachers, planning PD, researching apps and websites, troubleshooting, all in the name of technology education.  

Some of my personal/professional goals include the following:

• increase my PLN through Twitter, MBC, and this course
• complete EVSC's 30-Day challenge 
• create a system to help myself organize all of the resources I find
• find more ways to get inside others' classrooms to work with students and model for teachers
• help a few change the way they use technology
• get teachers to try something new
• start a tech team with students
• maintain a professional blog to share with my corporation

          Mostly, I'm just hoping to continue to bring new ideas to teachers and help them find ways to use technology to enhance what they need to do.