Creating a Voice

I'm up at TIE - Copper Mountain - this week and having a great time. There's a lot of learning going on, tons of smart people that care about learning, and it's a wonderful experience to be attending this conference.

Back in April I posted about leadership at all levels with our school walls and came to the conclusion that every student can and should be a leader. Now I've hit upon a bit of a snag in this idea and it's what I want to discuss in this blog post.

The problem I'm having with this fine idea is HOW to you get kids to create their voice? How do we as educators get a student to be a self-leader?How do you get them to care about their education and life-long learning?

Maybe I'm missing something? Perhaps our students are already "there" and just waiting for an opportunity to prove themselves to us? It actually wouldn't surprise me and it might be an approach to address this question of mine - just let them show us basically. What tools (tech tools?) can enable this style of learning for our students?

So rather than asking more questions I'm hoping a few of you who are reading this post will comment back and let me know what you think...

Day 1 with Netbooks

Our district is rolling out a plan to introduce Netbooks to all 5th, 6th and 9th grade Language Arts students in the fall. Today we started a week long course that introduces the Netbooks we will be using to our staff. It was wonderful that we will be able to use these tools next fall and that our district has given our staff the Netbook to use for the summer.

What better way to get the adults up to speed?

I'm anxious to see how this will evolve over this week as we learn together how to use the Netbooks. Stay tuned.