About this time last year, I wrote the following part of a blog post...
2/2/2014
That was certainly proven very recently. I’m writing this in a week where the power of social media and learning was clearly articulated. Splashed across the world media, Atlanta, Georgia basked again in it’s reputation for not being the place to be when precipitation freezes. My previous post was about the learning we can gain for real life from some of the content that we teach. The truest sense of inquiry based learning. Already there is a wiki attached to the Wikipedia about Atlanta concerning the January snowstorm of 2014 in the climate section. This is already populating with all the angles including the criticism of the city and state officials over the how the city should have been notified of the impending doom and #snowjam2014 . A testimony to a city of six million’s reliance on government watches and warnings and perhaps to further testify to our own individual Geography education in terms of being able to ascertain, from the plethora of meteorological sources and radar images now freely available from The Weather Channel and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that pointed to the clear fact that the snow was coming. Never have humans been so connected and have access to information that would enable an individual ability to figure out life’s problems – the trouble is we are reliant on the few experts that we depend on to figure it out for us and to perhaps tell us what to do!
A year on, history repeats itself. Winter Storm Remus is with us, with the Winter Storm Warning this time out 24 hours in advance, the city bracing itself after a couple of dodgy calls and "without snow" days. States of emergency declared to avoid taking vacation days from schools.
Perhaps this year we will avoid the hashtag of #snowjam2014 and due to "abundant caution", the city are safely home beside their televisions, watching endless loops of information and pictures of radars, snaps sent in on email and reports of road conditions. Perhaps this year the hashtag will be #wesawitcoming.
It would seem that reflection on what happened last year has happened and there is a sense of preparedness for this next round of winter weather. Another teachable moment for our students. Live and learn, right?
Which ever way we carve this, it's another couple of days out of school...and this year I've no classes to reach out to. What does an Instructional Technologist do on a snow day? One that's not in grad school would be hitting the Netflix hard...but the bandwidth is being utilized for good...like blog posts, reflections and discussion forums with a firm hashtag of #graduatingMay2015 in mind!
2/2/2014
That was certainly proven very recently. I’m writing this in a week where the power of social media and learning was clearly articulated. Splashed across the world media, Atlanta, Georgia basked again in it’s reputation for not being the place to be when precipitation freezes. My previous post was about the learning we can gain for real life from some of the content that we teach. The truest sense of inquiry based learning. Already there is a wiki attached to the Wikipedia about Atlanta concerning the January snowstorm of 2014 in the climate section. This is already populating with all the angles including the criticism of the city and state officials over the how the city should have been notified of the impending doom and #snowjam2014 . A testimony to a city of six million’s reliance on government watches and warnings and perhaps to further testify to our own individual Geography education in terms of being able to ascertain, from the plethora of meteorological sources and radar images now freely available from The Weather Channel and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that pointed to the clear fact that the snow was coming. Never have humans been so connected and have access to information that would enable an individual ability to figure out life’s problems – the trouble is we are reliant on the few experts that we depend on to figure it out for us and to perhaps tell us what to do!
A year on, history repeats itself. Winter Storm Remus is with us, with the Winter Storm Warning this time out 24 hours in advance, the city bracing itself after a couple of dodgy calls and "without snow" days. States of emergency declared to avoid taking vacation days from schools.
Perhaps this year we will avoid the hashtag of #snowjam2014 and due to "abundant caution", the city are safely home beside their televisions, watching endless loops of information and pictures of radars, snaps sent in on email and reports of road conditions. Perhaps this year the hashtag will be #wesawitcoming.
It would seem that reflection on what happened last year has happened and there is a sense of preparedness for this next round of winter weather. Another teachable moment for our students. Live and learn, right?
Which ever way we carve this, it's another couple of days out of school...and this year I've no classes to reach out to. What does an Instructional Technologist do on a snow day? One that's not in grad school would be hitting the Netflix hard...but the bandwidth is being utilized for good...like blog posts, reflections and discussion forums with a firm hashtag of #graduatingMay2015 in mind!