Learning

One of the main reasons I became a teacher was to have a job which allowed and encouraged me to keep learning my whole life. Also, I wanted to do something where I could share what I know and learn.
I'm very excited at the moment because my school allowed me to apply for a government sponsered program where we establish partnerships with Indonesian schools. Long story short, our application was successful and now we have a partner school in Indonesia. For the last couple of days (and the next couple as well) all the Australian and Indonesian teachers involved in this program this yr have been brought to Melbourne to get to know each other and to learn about using Web 2.0 in the classroom to build and maintain the relationships between the schools. I was a little worried - not being the most technologically minded person I am easily scared. Then I realised today how easy it is to use wikis, and how useful they can be in education.
The next hurdle will be persuading school to unblock wikis so that our students can access them and communicate with the partners in Indonesia. It does bug me that we spend a lot of time as educators learning about fabulous interactive tools that are available, only to return to our schools to find that they are not available to our school as someone has decided that these things are not in fact useful. ??? I don't understand.

Anyway, back to the positive - I love learning new informationand new skills and I intend to stand up and fight to be able to use these for the benefit of the students in our school and our partner school!