I am so incredibly grateful to be living in the 21st century! I’m an information junkie through and through, and with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks it seems like I can find anything I want to find. This makes me as happy as the day I learned, at four years old, that I could check out as many books from the library as I could carry. (Really, I remember the librarian saying that to me and I remember the stack I shuffled out to the car, the corners of the picture books poking the insides of my elbows, the way the books smelled when I got them back to my room). It was unbelievable and glorious, and now as an adult living in the age of high-speed internet, MacBooks, free content and open source software, it’s even better. 

Of the experiments I incorporated into my teaching in the last year — the nings, the wikis, the google forms, joomla and edublog, apture, animoto, zamzar, zoho, teachertube, etc… — 90 percent of them were triggered from tidbits on a blog (the school, a technology-centered high school, already had a wiki). I have learned so much this past year and it has energized by life and my teaching by opening up possibilities for creative experimentation and play that did not exist when I used the old 20th century tools of teaching: the overhead, the whiteboard, the VCR. 

I am still amazed at the generosity of bloggers. You can see the list of blogs I read on the right of this page; I check them daily (okay, several times a day, by logging into my Google Reader to see what’s new). It seems impossibly kind that bloggers will take the time to provide advice — and links! — on tools, to share notes from conferences, to relay concerns about the state of their minds/hearts/jobs/education/the world… all at no cost to me. Do they know they are impacting a classroom in Ventura, California? No. Do they understand that 170 sophomores spent a year building a Ning community because of them? No. Do they get it that a teacher who thought so many times about bailing on the profession has been reenergized? I hope so!

[Photo Credit: "Information Superhighway" by nickwheeleroz]

Here’s what I have on my stack:

• Renegade: The Making of a President by Richard Wolfe
• Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, by Vicky Myron and Brett Witter
• Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, by Hugh MacLeod
• Shanghai Girls: A Novel, by Lisa See
• Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan
• “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings, by Gerald Graff…
• And about 20 journalism books that the ASNE Journalism Fellowship program sent me!

I need a good memoir though. They’re my favorite type of reading, and Dewey is not going to not going to satisfy my craving.

Yay for summer reading!

(Photo credit:  Paul Watson, Flickr Creative Commons)