Where has the month gone?

I really haven't been interested in blogging lately. Over the summer, I blogged about my time spent in SL. What fun we had this summer twittering and chatting in SL. I spent some time on vacation in August that was very enjoyable. I started listening to the Edtech Talk and Webcast Academy live sessions. Those are very entertaining and inspirational. Then I came back and school started, to somewhat of a rocky start. I've enjoyed reading all the twitters and blogs this past month, learned so much, have so many new ideas and resources I would love to implement. I have met teachers willing to participate in collaborations, such as a mathlink moodle, blogmeister, or could have joined several other collaborative projects, like O.R.E.O. But I need students and classrooms in my district to participate. And the teachers just aren't ready to make even baby steps. Each year, I hope my district will have it together when school starts. Plan for the first days of school in regards to PD on Information Literacy and training. I had hoped the district would have had new hardware purchased for all the schools, but it hasn't been yet. A new building opened up, so a lot of time and effort of our tech dept went into getting that school opened. The new building is beautiful and of course has all the newest hardware. I came back to our 8 year old computers, that were not touched since summer school by any of the tech dept. The lab was left in a mess. A technician had started repairing the old ibooks over the summer, so that was a help. I jumped in as soon as I could to get the labs ready for testing, to help teachers switch their email to the new email program, and to just be support to the teachers as much as i could. I tried to touch base with teachers to get them excited about the possibilities of collaborating online. It's difficult to motivate teachers when computers start to smoke - remember they are 8 year old imacs! or are so slow they have trouble loading the new online calendar that is being implemented. One week of MAP testing is done, the teachers can't get their students into the lab until maybe the end of Sept when MAP testing is over, when the students can get their logins. There is only 1 computer in the classroom, that the teachers use mostly for their own needs, possibly to show streamed videos or websites. The students want to get onto the computers to research, to create, to collaborate. And we can't do it yet. So I wait and hope, that I can move forward to using information technology resources to help the students learn, provide them adventures in learning and meet their diverse learning styles using 21st century tools.