I left the classroom for 3 years in 1998 for a position in the instructional technology office of a large urban district because I thought at that time that technology had enhanced so much in my classroom. Three years later, I returned to the classroom; I had slowly become very aware that it was not the technology but the pedagogy that had altered the learning in my classroom. My mindset as an educator was been profoundly altered. In my classroom, my role was dramatically adjusted from “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side,” from “giver of information” to designer of learning experiences. As my youngsters eagerly anticipated the new learning experiences I designed, I implemented more authentic, project-based lessons. I tried to change the face of the how I taught, what I taught, and how I requested evidence of student mastery. The technology had been a transparent tool. The transformation you speak of from „traditional‰ classrooms to those in which students „are regularly engaged in authentic, multidisciplinary learning tasks., where collaboration is a regular part of teaching, learning, and assessment, and collaborative relationships are common among students and staff, where students are flexibly grouped based on interest and need, and these groupings often cross grade-level boundaries, and where the teacher is the primary architect of the learning environment and purposefully facilitates student learning with overt strategies for nurturing student independence is critical if our children are to be productive citizens in our global world. (The last sentence adapted from http://www.ncrel.org/engauge/framewk/efp/environ/efpenvco.htm)

I would agree that learning occurs in any environment and I would add that a nurturing environment, one that recognizes and addresses the fears of those resistant to change, one that shapes new behaviors, one that provides significant, meaningful and effective professional development, one that supports with suggestions and “Teflon lessons,” one that sends the message to educators ‘you are valued, you are an educator’, will empower educators becoming the wind beneath their wings as they then seek to change the way children learn, what children learn, and how children share what they know using technology. That doesn‚t speak to how to plan the environment but perhaps a vision of??

Those many years ago, we all were very isolated as teachers. Had I had the opportunities for collaboration and learning, made possible with today‚s technology, I would have been a much better educator much sooner and my students would certainly have benefited from that collaboration. Your suggestion for blogging and collaboration, in my mind, is of such value. The sharing, thinking, and reflecting that comes from such collaboration may help us achieve that transformation of which you speak.

The networked learning environment is where we should be heading - if for no other reason than it is also the way that business is going. Not that I’m a fan of following the business crowd, but it is easier to point to “the real world” to get parents and administrators to change things in schools than it is to point to theories from the Ivory Tower.

That being said, until education gets more priority, it is not likely that things will change as the status quo is cheap and for a generation fits to the mould of “that is how I was taught”.

The only thing that I would add to your piece of advice is that usually the simple solutions work best and if you start simple, success follows quickly and if there is a failure, it’s easy to recover. I would also add that in taking simple steps it’s even easier to beg forgiveness should the need for that arise as well.