Getting Ready to Jump Back in the Water

After a day out in the frigid sunshine, I am getting out of my denial about returning to school tomorrow,albeit without the students just yet. In any case, enjoying my last day of trying to keep up with things, including my Google Reader, which can just about overwhelm me with the amount of postings on somedays, and then just about overwhelm me with the content being posted by a number of educators I admire on others. I try to follow basically two types of groups: tech innovators and tech/education philosophers. For the most part, they pretty much go hand in hand, but technology, while being a very useful and important tool for learning, is not the "be all end all" in terms of 21st century learning.. More than technology alone can "make the world a better place" and allow us to mentor the learners we have been entrusted with.
On that note, I was blown away today by the thoughts and images shared by David Truss in his entry entitled,"Question Everything". At first, I was just going to share the image, but after contemplating ( yep, he gets me thinking) the content and the video that also accompanied his thoughts, I just thought I would share the whole thing. I am curious to know what others might think of this and how they answered the provocative questions he poses for educators and administrators.
Interestingly, I had been thinking about using the Motivational posters that Big Huge Labs allows you to create as a tool for students to use as part of our annual Justice Day celebration on January 13. Serendipitously, two bloggers I read today were talking about it, particularly the new option to open an educator account so that students can be enrolled without submitting an e-mail address. Big Huge Labs has expanded the options they provided considerably since I last used it; I will be spending sometime tonight investigating all the new possibilities. I am also intrigued by the quote from an English teacher who states her students created trading cards for historical figures. That will partner well with the Ning we just created for the 7th grade to work on in Social Studies when they return . They have assumed the persona of a famous historical character and has become a member of the Ning as that person. The teacher has provided a rubric about entries and images for our first foray into using Ning ( which now offers educational accounts that need to be secured with a credit card :( )as a tool for the students , not just for the teachers.
This all speaks to the power of Google Reader as an incredibly valid tool for my PLN. I learn more from these authors than I often do at conferences, although the hands-on workshops cannot compare when it comes to really " getting to know" a program. My Google reader account allows me the freedom to check what and whom i want when I want to, or just delete all postings to give myself a chance to just catch -up. While I don't use the latter option that often, it is often the one that allows me to accomplish the most.
I will end with something shared by Scott McLeod on his blog Mind Dump that pretty much captures what resolutions are all about:

our resolutions are not failed acts of the will, but successful acts of the imagination. You will not enroll in a doctoral programme and spend more time with your kids and lose 20 pounds in 2011 just by resolving to do so. But you will be far more doomed to fail – and far more emotionally impoverished – if you never even dream up those plans in the first place.

Kathryn Schulz via http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/31/new-year-resolutions