About

What is this blog about?

This blog is about the challenges and successes of integrating technology into the urban classroom, on the wrong side of the digital divide.  I’ve named it the “digital bluestocking” because I am ready to stop lurking on ed tech blogs, just like the women who participated in the French and English bluestocking literary salons in the 18th century.  I want to join the conversation.  This means putting my ideas out there in this blog, using Twitter and other tools to create a global PLN, and most importantly sharing my learning with teachers who might work in schools with little technology and teachers who are uncomfortable with technology.  This is the audience we really need to reach, as they form the majority of teachers in urban districts especially.  Most of the blogs I’ve found are miles above many of the teachers I know, so I hope to fill in that gap with my personal experiences.

Who am I?

I am a social studies teacher in a small high school in Chicago.  I teach an unusual class, called Geographic Information Systems, which uses mapping technology to analyze social and environmental problems.   The class was for juniors and its primary goal is for them to write a college level research paper that includes original social science data collection  (interviews & surveys), GIS maps of primary or secondary data, and concludes with a call to action.  I think of it as academic activism.  In addition to GIS, we use blogs, wikis, multimedia, and other digital tools to enhance our academic reading and writing.

I was born five years before the first net generation babies, but technology was more present in my childhood than many of my friends.  I can remember my first computer, an apple 2e, which came out in 1983.  I can picture it, sitting on a table in the basement, and I remember programming in logo with a little turtle scooting around the screen.  Fast forward to my first job in 1995.  In staff meetings heads would often turn from the speaker to me because one of my responsibilities was to translate my boss’s “computerese” to regular English and vice versa.   Since then I have immersed myself in the world of technology and have enjoyed being a digital advocate and translator for my peers, my colleagues, my family and my students.