Social Media: Darren Draper ask me what impressed me about Will Richardson's presenteations at the Literacy Promise conference last week. First, Will’s enthusiasm for how his own children (ages 10 and 12 I believe) are connected to so many intelligent people throughout the world (with his oversight and rules) caught my attention. Second, he demonstrated how he uses Google Reader for his RSS, and how he manages what could be an overload of information. I watched what he does and said, “I can do that!” Third, his emphasis on ethical and safe practices, and the concept of having hundreds of people reading and filtering information, writing articles and reviews, and communicating directly with authorities in your fields of interest startled me awake to the possibilities for classroon use. I started thinking how nice it would be for all the students at my school to have Google accounts they could use at home and school.
I'm sorry, I didn’t feel that way when Darren presented the list of 24 social medias to the district teacher librarians with a deadline to become familiar with 20 of them. I looked at the list and could only count seven that I had already done. Exploring and using 13 more in two months was like throwing more piranhas into the pool. Richardson stated at one point in his presentation: “Part of literacy is fixing mistakes.” So I am now attempting to fix that mistake. I still don't think I want to twiter, but I did add texting and internet to my cell phone , and I am texting (to my daughters' amazement). I signed up for RSS immediately and subscribed to Richardson's blog, wiki, and Powerful Learning Practices web site on Google Reader. I want to jump into the rest, but I am the kind of learner that likes to see it demonstrated, usually while I am following along, so that I don’t waist time slogging through on my own making tons of mistakes. Fortunately, says Richardson, there is a plethora of YouTube tutorials on many of the things I want to do. I don’t know if this addresses Darren's question, but it is too late to be brilliant. I like this quote from one of the articles I read at Powerful Learning Practices:

"Gaining confidence is extremely important in using new tools in the classroom. I notice that I usually have two options, roll it out and the class learns with me at the same time or I need to find a group of teachers to play with.
Either way I still find myself with no skills and don’t want to look foolish. Let’s see if we can work this out here. …We are going to help each other to learn how to use these tools in our classrooms."
“Gaining Confidence” Brian Licata, quoted in “We Are Going to Help Each Other Learn” by Lani Ritter-Hall .