Toes in the Water

After reading Bill Ferriter's "Taking the Digital Plunge" I had the opportunity to reflect on my own immersion in the digital world. I have a Facebook account. I have two blogs - this, and a half-hearted one on my half-hearted experience with being a vegetarian. I own a laptop, desktop, iPod, iPad, cell phone, XBox, and Wii. I use a digital projector, almost daily. I grade online, email students, parents, and co-workers, and search for images and ideas on a daily basis. I check the weather online, see news updates, and have replaced my stacks of books on my nightstand with a slimmer, neater, digital library. I have gone digital, but am I plunging? Or am I sitting in the shallow end of the pool dunking my toes?

While I have all the tools and use them frequently, I am not entirely sure that I have plunged into the digital world. Granted, ten years ago, much of what I do would be foreign to think about. Grading online? Instant access to my gradebook by parents and students? Downloading texts, movies, music, and shows? These are all very new, and very useful technologies. What Bill Ferriter got me thinking about is something we have been discussing since the first week - though I am using this new digital world, I am still largely doing old things in new ways.

Mr. Ferriter talked about his use of technology. He has students use VoiceThread to have conversations online about course content. He links to educators in countries all over the world, and encourages his students to link to students in other countries to get use to the idea of working with someone half a world away. He follows blogs and shares with his students and co-workers what he learns from them. Bill has indeed plunged.

I think, however, it is a learning process. Crawling comes before walking. Doggie-paddling comes before swimming the backstroke. You have to get in the pool before you can even attempt to swim. At this point, I am happy to be in the pool and thinking about taking the first strokes of a swim. Maybe I'll flounder a bit, maybe my students will flounder around with me, but I don't think we'll go under, and I am pretty confident that through floundering we will grow more comfortable in the digital depths and eventually find ourselves swimming with confidence.