From Info to Process

Among the many things I wanted to change, along with starting this reflective blog, was to change the info I provided to the students I teach. I had been following several blogs and other sites for good info and was gathering up quite a collection of neat stuff. I was using bookmarks and tags before I realized I was using them, via PortaPortal. This worked great for some time and I actually felt confident I was doing a good job.

However, as I stated in my last post, I started to feel like I was giving the kids the information they were to learn and just regurgitate the facts when it came time to do so. Was there any real learning happening? I felt the answer was no. Perhaps there was a little knowledge gained along the way, but nothing that would have been beneficial in the long term.

The kicker for me was that my list of websites collected, bookmarked, tagged, you name it, was growing rather long and it became cumbersome to actually find what I was looking for. Then I read someone's blog post (I can't remember who – apologies to that person) that really put an explanation point on my thinking – students need to be learners, not memorizers. Another realization of sorts – we live in an Information (or Digital) Age. Any information that is needed can just be found on the internet.

So I did something I thought I would never do – hit the “delete” key on a bunch of sites. I went through the lists I had and this took a good portion of three days. In this process, I asked myself some questions. The ones that came up the most were...

1. Is this an informative site or a tool to use? If it was informative, it was deleted.
2. Is this tool something my students or I could use?
3. What kind of tool is it?
4. Is it visually pleasing, easy to figure out how to use/understand? (I ask this cuz I teach deaf students and Garder's visual intelligence is a strength of ours)

By the time I was done, my list was practically whittled down to 15% (just a guess really) of what it was. Being the organizer I am, I wanted to categorize the sites in a way that would still be easy to find and still know what I'm looking at. A blessing fell in my lap – I was in a Twitter chat at the time and someone shared a link to LiveBinders, an online “binder” of sorts. After checking it out, I thought this was the answer I was looking for. An easy way to separate the stuff I had into different binders, yet still have different tools within each binder. Furthermore, I could preview a website right in the binder to determine if I wanted to actually use that site. Perfect for visual learners like my students (and myself too!!!)

So I went about furiously categorizing the remaining tools and now have several binders on a “shelf” that anyone can access because I made it public (A perk - you determine privacy settings). In addition to that, no password is needed to view these binders. So long, Portaportal and thanks for the memories. So you can go check out my shelf if you are interested. If you find something you want to use, then I'm glad I helped you out. I would also appreciate any sites/tools you could share with me and I'll add to my binders if I feel it would be helpful.

I do have to admit I feel very nervous that I do not have all these websites handy anymore. However, I remind myself constantly these days “It'll be worth it – think of the long term results.” It's quite a change for me, but change in most cases is good. In this case, to become a better teacher, I have to challenge my students to become better learners. What do you all think? Am I nuts for dumping all the sites I did? Should I have kept some? What do you all do?