It's relationships, not just technology, that make a difference.
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We are back and ready to continue sharing our stories of learning! I wanted to start by sharing something I learned over the summer.
In August, I was fortunate enough to host a session at the Ohio Innovative Learning Environments Conference . I was eager to present on the topic of blogging in schools and sharing how Hilliard Horizon participated in the #learn365 project by blogging about what our community was learning each day.
Since the Ohio ILE Conference has the word “innovative” in its title, it made me think that technology was going to be a major theme for the conference. That also made me think that people were going to be expecting me to talk a lot about how we used technology. Blogging this school year did involve a lot of technology use in order to share our learning and I was ready to put the focus of the session on the technology and web-based apps we used.
However, when I look back on the posts we did, the themes that were most common had nothing to do with technology. Our learning community shared stories of relationships, collaboration, hopes, dreams, and reflections. We did share a couple of posts about technology, but within those posts were ways we were using technology to connect with others in order to learn.
Learning about how we can utilize technology in our classrooms is important for us educators to do in order to strengthen our instruction. However, I believe that there needs to be a larger purpose that drives this learning.
Last year, I learned that there is amazing power in connecting with others through technology and sharing what we are learning. This affirmed my belief that it’s the relationships and the connections we make with other learners, not the technology, that really matters most.
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