Oh no! Our Internet connection at school is down today and going over my to-do list this morning, I realized everything I have to do—including this blog posting-- is Internet based! Really hits home how web dependent we have become. So I’m going the “old fashioned” way and writing in Word with the hopes of pasting it to my blog later today.
All these Internet troubles also reinforce something I was thinking about over the weekend. This Internet outage is going to cause some teachers to have to juggle their plans at the last minute but that will be hard for many of them. Why? A lack of flexibility and the ability to change plans is rampant around here. My campus has a serious case of TTWWADI—“That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
For example, “I’ve always had my students write book reports.” So if I try to show that particular teacher an Internet tool like glogster.edu or animoto.com, the response I get is “TTWWADI.” Researching using online books—“I always make my students use library books”. Yeah, okay, our collection is dated and not very current because so much information is available on the Internet. Or the converse—“I just tell my students to go to Yahoo—they’ll find everything they need for research.” Right—how many scholarly journals are indexed through Yahoo?
How do I stamp out TTWWDI? Not sure one person can. It takes a shift in thinking from everyone, not just a few. Now, a few people can instigate the change, but I’m finding that, without a full scale shift in the campus mindset—from the top on down, it’s not going to happen. And as the “Lone Ranger Librarian” on this campus, my influence is limited.
But I keep plugging away. It just takes one teacher, one student, one administrator to start making some ripples that will eventually change the mindset around here. Until then I’ll just keep fighting TTWWADI as hard and fast as I can.
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