My New Hero

I'm pretty sure that Shelly Blake-Plock is my new hero. Today I began reading his blog TeachPaperless as a way to turn my thinking from relaxing on break back to the world of Education, and I must say, it did the trick.

Many of SB-P's posts point readers to resources or current issues in the news. His most recent blog post TeachBookless is an excerpt from the NPR story Books Have Many Futures (also worth checking out) that ran last week. There is also a nice list of other blogs he follows relevant to Education and Technology.

However, the real meat of TeachPaperless can be found under the heading "Favorite Posts." Read them all. Seriously. Whether you agree with him or not, SB-P unapologetically offers answers to the important questions surrounding the use of technology in the 21st Century classroom that are sure to make you think.

The first post that struck me was Why Teachers Should Blog. SB-P managed to squelch any doubts that may have been lingering in my mind about blogging. Consider this: "I blog and what I blog--and how that message is received by others--tells me what I think. And it tells me how I think." This rings true to me. When I read my old posts, I can see the course of my own thinking, my own growth, and the path that led me to the place where I now stand. He also responds to a student's concern that he has nothing to add to the public discussions that happen on blogs and Twitter. To this he says, "To blog, you can't always allow yourself to be burdened by overthinking. At times this will lead you to a scary place. A place without a safety net. A place full of prat falls." I found this reassuring. I know that I've stared at my blank posts with the worry that whatever I write will somehow be wrong, or worse yet, offensive. I end up thinking myself into a corner. But, SB-P says, "real maturity is not about having the right answers, it's about having the audacity to have the wrong answers and re-address them in light of contemplation, self-argument, and experience." Be still my heart.

While that post caused me to strike a contemplative pose--brow furrowed, chin in hand, I Was a Paper Junkie cracked me up. In this post, SB-P comes clean with his dark past as a "paper junkie." He chronicles his copier-obsessed binges from his early years of teaching (I think I've been guilty of nearly all of them myself), including printing off ebooks (Yep, done that). The best part, though, is when he talks about how he actually made the shift to paperless teaching.

"It wasn't that I was some tech wizard. I certainly wasn't all that environmentally conscious. I barely used the Internet with the exception of reading bulletin boards and getting my morning news.

"Rather, the reason I got into paperlessness was because I was too dumb to figure out how to hook a printer up to my new laptop and too stubborn to ask the IT department to do it for me."

I found great comfort in this. It's reassuring to know that you don't have to have some innate affinity for technology in order to use it effectively in the classroom. This notion comes up again and again throughout SB-P's blog, which is perhaps why I am so drawn to it. He demystifies the idea of what it means to educate students who will be living in the 21st Century. It is definitely a blog worth checking out.