Well thank you for participating in history makers. Would
you like to introduce yourself? Um I'm Sharon
Smaldino and I hold an endowed chair position. I
held the L. D. And Ruth G.
Mortgage endowed chair for teacher education which is a little
different than most I. T. And I'm at
northern Illinois in the College of Education. How many
years have you been there? This is my 10th
year time flies when you're having too much? Wasn't
what universities were you working with before? Prior to
that? Uh For I spent a long time at
Northern Iowa, you never see northern Iowa. And
so it was kind of an interesting transition because I
went from you and I and I went from being
yes molino at 12 small dino s at the other
and it just got really crazy crazy in my emails
and trying to remember where I was. So everything
is northern whatever and I go from here. What
is your primary focus of your work? I have
, Well I have two venues that I'm really interested
but my primary responsibility right now tends to be in
teacher education and looking at what we're doing in terms
of preparation of educators in terms of looking at how
we're integrating or bringing technology into the schools in ways
in which we're changing education. Hopefully changing the way
in which teachers are interacting with the technology, but
interacting with the Children and the learning and trying to
see how the technology can be used in unique and
and really basically innovative ways. Is that your primary
area of research focus as well? That and my
other area is looking at online learning or distance education
. I'm really looking at how it is. We
go about structuring the learning environment and I'm really right
now focusing in on some of those decision processes that
we go through as instructor designers and what are some
of the things that we're choosing to do as we
design and because we can do a variety of different
kinds of things. How are we making these decisions
to make these design decisions to implement online? How
did you get interested in the field? It's a
long story, but I've been around for a long
time and we walked in here. I actually uh
have always been interested in how Children interface with the
materials and for a long time. I, well
I started off in a totally different field, but
when I was working with a group of deaf Children
actually, they were arranging, they were probably adolescence
and they had difficulty using regular classroom materials, the
whole structure of their language system and what they understood
and how they could read, how they could write
, how they could communicate was not the same as
the traditional child interfacing with these same materials. And
so I felt like there was a real disconnect not
from the perspective that these kids weren't capable of doing
this, they were very smart Children. The problem
was is that the materials weren't right for them.
And so my interest became one of how do you
redesign materials to really need the individual learning needs of
these kids? So I started off in special end
, I was in special and I mean I had
a background in special, if I started off kind
of teaching or taking courses and teaching in the context
of special ed. And so I was working my
way through coursework and I reached that moment in your
scheduled courses. I was a student at large.
You reach that point where it's like, okay,
you have to become a matriculating student, you have
to get in a program, And it was like
, do why I just want to keep taking horses
. But the university had this policy that you couldn't
just accumulate a Brazilian hours, you actually had to
get to be a matriculating student in a program.
And I was looking through the catalog, kinda everybody
thought I was going to go into special ed.
And I went, no, you know, I
think I'm gonna go up and talk to those media
people. And they were like, why? And
I said, because I think that's really where I'm
interested. And just about that same time, the
desktop computer came out on that just about that time
, you know, they had the uh, or
not the laptops, desktop computers where you actually had
floppy disks that were eight inches in, in what
not, But they came out and it was like
, okay, that looks to me like the perfect
tool. And I was looking at this thing,
thinking we really need to know how to use this
, and we need to know how to use this
in creative and innovative ways to help my students who
are these decades, because I thought it was the
perfect instructional tool, I thought you could make it
do things and at that point in time, the
only way I could do that was to take programming
languages. And so I learned to program in basic
and super basic and pascal, and I learned a
little assembly, but that wasn't what I wanted.
I wanted to be able to adapt the materials that
adapt the programs to meet the needs of my students
. And so I started really digging around deeper and
deeper and deeper into this. And that's why I
ended up in the field of it. I mean
, it just literally was because I wanted to meet
the needs of these students. Now, I haven't
worked with those students ever since. So I have
no idea in the bigger picture whether or not this
really did become an innovative tool for them. But
I saw it in the context of an innovative tool
for all students to learn. And so it didn't
matter whether they were hearing impaired or whether they were
language um learners or whether they were in fact brilliant
kids. This struck me as being the one thing
that you could use across all venues, whether they
have special needs or whether they are creative and innovative
and gifted. Somewhere in that continuum of kids.
This was the thing you could use, you mentioned
distance education, where did you get your interest in
distance education? When did that happen? How did
that come about? That was a funny one too
. I actually started off working with Michael Apple two
E and my husband and I decided that it might
be kind of fun and funky if we could communicate
with family because we were living quite a distance away
from her as the family. So we bought a
motive A 300 broad rape modem which today would be
deemed to be so. And we bought this.
Nobody else in the family had ones. So we
had to kind of teach everybody how to do this
. And I took the motive into the office one
day and I said to the secretary I want to
do some some email stuff. So the only line
I could plug into, the only phone line I
could plug into was her phone line because it was
the only one that was a type of wine phone
line that I could actually connect my computer too.
So it was rather amusing because of course we didn't
have computers in our offices. We didn't have wifi
, we didn't have any of that at that point
I'm really than and so I would say now lois
whatever you wanna do, you just go and work
and do your own thing because guess what? I'm
going to be using this for the next hour.
And I actually started off doing the whole thing in
email and the first online course I ever taught was
it was totally done by email. Yes. The
whole thing we did that all the students communicated with
each other. I would send out my prompts for
discussion and then we would have all these reply alls
and we would have all these discussions and the students
hated it. Not because they didn't like the course
and they didn't like the opportunity and the experience.
What they hated Was the fact that they would log
into their emails and have 60, 70, 80
new email messages because there was all this interactivity and
communication amongst and between. So it was kind of
an interesting adventure. So I really wanted to get
into more of how do you design courses to accommodate
the needs of students from variety of locations and how
do you design courses in the context of the tools
and resources map? It was a lot of fun
, particularly because we didn't have course management tools.
We didn't have those kinds of free flowing types of
things. Uh the internet was, I have been
teaching for several years before we actually got an internet
and the web was even further down the road from
that, the whole idea of having a web based
interface was just a whole brand new thing. Yeah
, I am not against. It's a fascinating story
. Can I ask another question about that? What
what is something that worked well about that approach or
was there something that worked well that you would that
some technique is still used today? I think what
worked well was I had to learn the economy of
questions. I had to learn the economy of prompts
. So that because otherwise if I, you know
when I first started doing it at the beginning of
the semester, I would put out a prompt and
then that I would keep keep that discussion going by
continuing to add prompts to the whole thing. And
I had to learn how to make it economical because
as I said, we were all logging on with
50, 60, 70 new email messages daily.
And it was just, it was crazy. So
I had to learn how to post my prom or
submit my prom or prepared in such a way that
it was economical for everyone to be able to then
respond to it in a way that didn't lay out
these horrendously huge number of emails. So, and
that's something that I've tried to work with over the
time. Learning how to pose questions or learning how
to to direct prompts in ways that makes sense.
And you're not putting a lot of time into people
trying to figure out what it is you're trying to
ask or coming up with minuscule answers that then you
have to re probe or you have to redirect so
they come into deeper. So how do you put
the prompt together to immediately engage them in the deep
thought questions that you want them to be engaged in
? So, it was an interesting step forward for
me to learn how to ask questions. Well,
well, it's a wonderful story. Thank you for
sharing. Could you describe your career path? Well
, I think I sort of did, but I
started off, I never, ever, ever,
ever, ever, ever, ever wanted to be
a teacher, never wanted to do that. In
fact I wanted to be an architect. But um
at the time, uh well, there are two
variables that fell into place at the time. Architecture
was not considered to be a woman's career path.
I am really pretty old. Um the, what
happened was that pretty much most women went into nursing
or teaching and my mother who was a person who
would have loved to have gone to college but didn't
would that all wanted all of her daughters to go
to college, but they didn't. So I was
this child and I was obligated to go to college
and I had a choice of one of two careers
because those are the two careers my mother wanted,
one was nursing And the other one was teaching.
Now nursing totally turned me off. I mean it
was the whole thought of doing some of those things
that nurses have to do is just not on my
list of things to do. So I chose to
go into education, but I didn't want to be
a classroom teacher, so I chose to go into
speech pathology, I'd still be in the schools,
I'd still be working with Children, but I wouldn't
be doing it on a daily basis of the same
normal grind. In my mind, it was the
same normal grind. And here I am now in
teacher education, working with pre service teachers going,
I can't believe I'm doing this because I never wanted
to be there to start with, but I got
into it and what I found was a world of
working with Children who had hearing loss is and I
began to really look at learning from the perspective of
how do we overcome this, this disability, this
problem, How do we still engage these Children in
learning? Because they're not stupid, they just don't
have this normal audio vehicle of the learning process.
So how do I work forward into this? So
I actually started getting into teaching, which was not
where I was going to go in my initial phase
of this. Okay, so I was in teaching
and I was doing all of that stuff in the
last place in the world I ever wanted to do
was go back to school after I got my bachelor's
degree and somehow I ended up in the Master's program
in elementary education, which was not where I wanted
to go, uh except that it was the logical
next step. So I did that I taught school
, I, we moved a lot as part of
my husband's early career. And so I just kept
moving around and getting new jobs and sort of reinventing
myself in the field. And because I had this
speech path background where I was an itinerant going from
building to building the building, and I had this
elementary degree where I taught Children, I managed to
sort of evolve it into becoming the itinerant deaf teacher
who would go from building to building the building to
work with kids individually or in small groups on their
learning tasks and doing those kinds of things. So
I went from there to ending up in a situation
where I was working in a school for socially and
emotionally disturbed youth. It was a residential school.
So these are the kids who are the rejects of
public schools. And they were truly wonderful kids.
Even bigger challenges than my regular special population. They
were now even huge challenges because in addition to having
a hearing laws, they also had some social emotional
lack of performance. So I ended up going back
to school to take courses and to learn about this
stuff and also to kind of learn about this technology
stuff. And then I got talked into going to
adopt program. The rest is kind of history.
From that point on, I ended up in working
in a program and that we have this service course
for teachers and pre service teachers. And I started
teaching this course and going, okay, this works
. And I kept saying to my colleagues and I
kept I kept going down to the Dean's office and
saying, you know, this computer thing is really
a big deal and we don't have them and I
can't teach these people to become good teachers without having
these things. And so I was able to convince
them to redirect funds. And we bought computers for
the for the college and we bought labs and we
had, you know what not. And his laptops
came out, we, you know, I was
back down in the office going, hi, it's
me again, um, just being a little pest
. So we kept trying to, you know,
to explain that these are the, you know,
in order for us to prepare good teachers, we
have to be doing the right thing. And so
, um where I am now, it's kind of
an interesting situation. Was a few weeks ago,
I was invited to apply for this endowed chair position
in Teacher Education with the idea that I come in
with this background of understanding, trying to understand learning
and how do you facilitate learning in their process?
But also that I advocate for using the tools and
the resources that are appropriate to facilitate learning in any
trial. And so it was a natural fit for
me and I was able to move segway into a
different level of position. So I have a lot
of fun in my current position because I can do
what I want and how I want and I can
work with kids in the schools and teacher education.
Um faculty, I can work with pre service candidates
, I can work with classroom teachers and I can
do lots of, there's definitely a lot of breath
in the fields. Oh definitely. You hear that
in your stores as well. Thank you for sharing
. We've touched on this a little bit, but
I'll circle back. How would you describe your research
, your research interests when you first started your career
and how they've changed? I first started, I
think what I was trying to do initially was to
demonstrate that the computer tools because we were just we
were really at the forefront of a lot of these
things that you all take for granted at this point
. But we were initially trying to get through this
and trying to show that there were differences in the
ways in which Children interface with this and interacted with
this. I started off with my special ed populations
because those are the ones in hand. You tend
to go with a convenience sample. So it was
like these were the kids were convenient so we'll work
with them. But what I did was I also
started trying to look at what we were doing in
actual practice with preparation of educators, both in service
educators and because they were in the same boat at
the same time, they were also trying to learn
this stuff. I remember one of my workshops that
I did, I came in, I schlepped all
this stuff in the data projector, slept in the
data projector and slept in the, the laudable and
hooked it all up, got everything running and I
put up my power point slide and hey, you
know, welcome to all learned who they all were
and you know, and then hit the next,
hit the arrow button and the next slide came up
and I started to talk about what we were going
to be doing in this workshop and they wait,
wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,
wait. And I said, what, what did
you just do? They had never seen power point
. They had no idea what I had in terms
of all this stuff. And so I had to
take about 10 minutes out of my workshop just to
explain it wasn't the purpose of this workshop. I
had to explain what it was and then they wanted
more of that. So it was like, okay
, so when I first started off, we were
teaching people the word process. We were teaching adults
, teachers to word process, to use spreadsheets,
to how to build databases. We're building power points
and teaching them how to do this. This stuff
we teach kids to do now. But at the
time even the educators didn't have it. So it
opened up a whole world of possibilities. And a
lot of my early work is done in how do
you work with educators, both pre service and in
service educators to learn to use these things and now
we learn to use these things, but to change
the learning environment at the same time, which is
really what I wanted to do. But it's hard
because that's a major mental step to go from.
I can put together a power point and use it
to show my kids two. I'm going to have
my kids use power point in this creatively different way
and moving them from there over that. That's,
that was a lot of my early work because,
and it's the same with online learning when we started
in distance at taking them from where they were to
rethinking and re engaging them in a different type of
thinking on how you engage your learners at this level
. When we first in Iowa was one of the
first states who had a major um statewide fiber optic
And they had 800. Now they have about 800
video classrooms. And when we first started, we
were teaching the teachers how to use these major video
classrooms and they were beautifully done. I mean they
were really well organized multiple cameras, lot uh,
computer interface control panel for it, lots of resources
right at their fingertips and so on. Um,
interestingly enough when we were training them to use this
, I mean it takes you about Maybe 10 minutes
to train them how to use all the parts because
it's pretty, it's not only intuitive, but it
says, you know, teacher camera, student camera
, overhead camera. Okay. You know, you
can read, you can push the right button and
there you are. So it takes you just a
few minutes to learn to use the appropriate different buttons
on this screen. But what I, what we
had to do was get them to understand that you
couldn't just be the talking head. So how do
you take good classroom practice that you engage in in
face to face all the time? How do you
take good classroom practice and translated into this tool into
this resource that you're not comfortable with? So getting
them to think about how do you create interactivity between
multiple sites? How do you create interactivity in ways
of getting the learners to be in multiple sites or
different sites and still work collectively together as groups.
And a lot of our early work that I did
we I worked very closely with a gal who's still
in Northern Iowa, we actually spent a lot of
time doing workshops and writing about creating interactivity and creating
that kind of learning environment that you know as best
practice in this world, that's totally mediated. And
so how do you transition over? And then at
that point we're also starting to look at online learning
and how do you create those kinds of inter activities
? How do you create those kinds of learning experiences
in this mediated world? That's for all intents and
purposes, not a world that everybody is comfortable in
? So that was that's kind of how I evolved
from what I was doing with the computer stuff to
evolving into my online work. And really it's all
still the same stuff because it's how do you use
these resources to reinvent learning opportunities? How do you
take these things and make it possible for learning to
occur? And so that's that's sort of in my
history in terms of my research and how it's evolved
. And and actually right now, my current peace
is looking at a lot of us who are sort
of, I know what it calls pioneers, I
guess I could call myself a pioneer, a lot
of us who worked in this long enough and are
very comfortable with this are people who are also designing
our own instructions. So we're really designer instructors or
instructor designers. But we have both worlds. We
have the instructional design world in our in our repertoire
of our thinking. And we also have the educational
world in our repertoire of thinking. But there are
people out there who are designing online learning who have
their content and there potentially good instructional practice. They
don't have the design world as part of their thinking
. So I'm really starting to look at the instructor
designer who is not a designer, the non designer
, instructor designer and what kinds of thinking they're going
through Or are there things we need to be doing
to facilitate that process, to getting them thinking about
these same things we think about as we intuitively do
as members of the field. So it's kind of
looking at it from a different perspective but it's still
creating quality online learning experiences but outside my venue of
it or any kind schooling stuff. So definitely a
lot of bridges. Yeah there's lots of places you
can go with this. I think that's the part
that makes it so much fun. I expect you
can't get bored with this field. That's the one
thing I did learn very early on. It sounds
like you've taken. Mhm. What were some of
the major ideas or approaches that stimulated your professional growth
? Um Oh golly. I think probably for me
one area or one thing was just learning about this
thing called instructional design. It had never really been
given to me in that sense, never understanding all
of the nuances and the layers and the levels of
your thinking within the context of designing instruction. I
was just real lesson plans and did what I did
and and I had a couple of methods courses,
so I kind of knew how to teach a little
of this and I love that little something else and
it's there's but there's a deeper layer of thinking and
it was that whole instructional design stuff that I I
really began to understand now what I didn't know before
. The other one was as part of my dissertation
work, I got into looking at really delving into
the learner and looking very specifically at learners and looking
at how you understand the learners and and what are
some of the characteristics that the learners bring to the
table. And I was working with adults as part
of my dissertation. So looking at it, what
do adults bring to the table in terms of their
own preconceived notions, their own approaches to problems that
you're asking them to solve? What are the things
that I need to know about them? So I
got really, really very fascinated by all the learner
research that was being done. And looking at the
way in which I then that took me back to
my special end days where I went well, yeah
, some of these kids would handle it this way
and some of these kids would handle it that way
well, duh, now I understand it, but
I didn't understand it at that point. So I
think that was one of the major things that as
I got into this field, that was one of
the major things that really started to move me forward
. The other one was looking at the medium itself
, looking at the media and looking at these things
and how do we construct the environment? How do
we deal with? And that was a lot of
the early work of Popeye Nick and and Mike Melinda
and Jim Russell, who I actually ended up working
with in terms of that there book. But it
became one of those things as I looked at this
, they really were not talking so much about the
actual tools as much as they were. How do
you create the venue to make it possible for the
learner to take the learning experience and actually make it
meaningful for them? And so that became an important
aspect of what I was learning to sew between looking
at the learner themselves, but also looking at how
the medium can in fact influence the way the learner
interfaces with information. It was also important for me
and so out of them, I think I've grown
into more of who I am today, I think
thank you for sharing what were some of the most
important trends in the field during their career? Well
, as I said, I started off before we
all had desktops. Mhm I started off before we
I actually the first two years I taught the media
course, I had to teach the kids how to
throw in the 16 millimeter projector and how to flip
a slide over in the slide train so that this
slide was right side up. Uh That's very embarrassing
. I actually um started off looking at how do
you use the overhead projector in a constructive and creative
ways? I mean I was teaching kids how to
teach with an overhead projector. I was teaching with
an overhead projector. So a lot of the stuff
that you take naturally now wasn't around them or if
it was around, it was not something that we
could afford. Uh, in schools of education,
they tended to be an engineering schools or they tended
to be in the high science areas or computer science
areas. They weren't in schools, they weren't in
colleges of education. So we didn't have a lot
of that fun stuff. And it wasn't until I
actually was in the business of teacher education that we
actually started getting some of those fun tools and some
of those fun things. Um, I started teaching
, um, logo and I started teaching hyper card
and, uh, some of those other earlier languages
. I, one of my first experiences and,
and the big chuckle on this one is my current
university president. Was one of the people who was
at the University of Illinois at the time. I
was using tutor language, which was part of the
old plato system. Okay, that's long before your
time. Um, and they had a plasma screen
interface. It was a touch screen interface. It
was really very, very basic, but they used
a special language called tutor. It's the only programming
book I ever kept. Ironically, my current university
president was one of those graduate students on the backside
of the machinery, so to speak. He was
one of those who was working on designing the code
for tutoring. And I just, when he mentioned
that I just about fell off the chair laughing because
I was probably the only person in the room who
knew what he was talking about. So he was
coding tutor. I was trying to use tutor.
It was just one of those, it was another
one of those programming languages I learned, but I
learned a lot about uh, in the process that
I was, one of the things I learned was
never get comfortable with any of it because tomorrow is
a whole new day and a whole new thing is
going to come down the pike and a whole new
way of doing things with these tools is going to
happen. So you have to build into what you're
doing, no matter who you are and no matter
where you are, you have to build flexibility into
your thinking constantly. But the underlying pieces, learning
is learning, Learning is there. We still haven't
solved all the questions we have with regard to it
, but the ultimate fundamental thing that we're looking at
is improving learning experiences. So, um I think
that's kind of where I was going to that question
, but who are some of the people who have
had the most impact on your professional growth? Why
I never met some of these people? Or I've
met them in very brief ways. But then there
are those who I have, I think I have
two genres of people. I think early on it
was Leslie, Briggs and robert gagne because that was
the school of thought was working on in terms of
my id back. They were the ones who were
presented to me as being the, the experts.
Walter Dick was another one. I met him years
later and it was like, oh, you're walter
Dick. I would never have picked him out of
a crab because he wasn't who I thought. I
mean, I had these sort of pinnacle views of
these people, but those were early on. They
were books that I read. Those were the people's
materials that I read. Those were the, the
sort of the authority figures at that point when I
started. But as I evolved along, I ran
into people like Mike Hanifin and charlie Rangel. Ooh
, you know, David Jonathan, others in that
same era of people who are doing fantastically amazing things
with this field that I hadn't thought about. So
I moved from the old classics into sort of the
modernists as it were in terms of the field.
And I think in some ways they were also very
influential in my thinking about what are some of my
, my thoughts. I love some of the work
that the work that David was doing in particular with
regard to looking at problem solving in complex, simple
and simple to complex problems. And how do you
develop problems for Children to solve? Use and have
them interface with the tools and technologies to as resources
that they can use. So basically moving them into
learning but moving them into learning by giving them problems
as the way of approaching the learning. And that
was a major the ah ha moment for me in
terms of the, I changed my style of teaching
at that point. So instead of telling people about
stuff, I started creating scenarios for them and presenting
situations for them that they then had to delve into
the work and into the information to be able to
solve that problem. And so my whole way of
approaching teaching changed because of some of that work.
I I think there are, you know, I
just went to a very interesting session with a young
man who kept talking about his dissertation and I he
said he's a newbie in the field, so to
speak. And a lot of what he was saying
it was like well, that's that's very interesting.
And I should make a mental note to myself to
go and look more at his work, but also
to kind of delve a little bit deeper into some
of the references and the resources he was using.
Because it was it was a good curiosity. So
I think it's it's all along the continuum of,
you know, the classics, some of the people
who I would like to call contemporaries, hopefully they
would call me a contemporary. And then I think
there's the new people out there who are doing some
really neat, good stuff that I think is also
very important. And I think my students have also
been very important to me in terms of influencing me
to think not just my doc students, but even
my master students, the teachers I work with,
but also the undergraduate students, because they asked me
the why would I want to do that question?
And it's like, well, that's a very good
question because I said, so isn't sufficient used to
be, but it isn't anymore. So it's getting
to understand that one of the beauties of this field
, but one of the things that I like most
about what I do is I seem to be able
to move around within all of the people in the
field and be able to, I find snippets of
what everybody has been a factor in terms of my
thinking, what do you think was the greatest accomplishment
of your career? Why? I kept looking at
that court, She sent me these questions before,
I kept looking at that question going, I don't
know, I don't honestly know if I have the
greatest accomplishment. I'm sure people would say, oh
, you've done this and you've done this. And
in fact, when I got invited to be part
of this video sequence, I said to Barbara,
I really don't know why you would be asking me
. And her comment was, and she started ticking
off all these things. Um I think among other
things, I've been able to perhaps provide some leadership
to the association, I am a past president.
Um it's going to be proud of, I think
I've uh done some things within my writing. A
couple of text books that are out there have been
, I think important, particularly the, the instructional
technology and media from learning book is one that I
think has evolved since I joined the writing team,
but it's also a book that I when I meet
undergraduate or graduate students ago. Oh yeah, I
used that book when I was, I think it's
a book that has influenced them in some ways,
so, and perhaps I've influenced teacher educational level,
but I think probably my greatest accomplishment as I watch
them walk around and have a factorial positions and present
and right, are my students, um because I've
somehow been able to touch a little bit of them
in a way that's made them be able to move
forward in their own careers and been able to become
important in their own venue. And I think that
that's an important aspect of, I think probably if
I had to pick an accomplishment, I think it's
my students, I hope it's my students, How
do you want to be remembered within this profession?
Uh, you know, that was the other question
I kept going. You know, it's it's kind
of an interesting puzzle I would like, and this
makes you feel like, you know, you're old
and gray and you're in the nursing home or even
past that point and people like, oh yeah,
I remember her, she was the lady who was
, you know, I think what I would like
most for people to remember, oh, in terms
of things that I've tried to contribute is that I'm
trying to get people to think about what it is
that we are doing and how can we do them
differently? Because what we're doing is what we used
to do. I don't want to think about today
. I don't even want to think about tomorrow.
I want to think where are we going to be
10 years from now or 20 years from now in
terms of education, when I'm working with undergraduates,
I don't want to think about them in terms of
this semester Or when you go out to student teaching
two semesters from now, I would like to be
remembered as someone who is trying to get people to
think differently out of the box is always what they
say, but really not, you can still be
in the box but thinking it differently. I think
if you look at the classroom, if you look
at it from the perspective of this is the entity
I work in, how can I work in this
entity differently so that the Children or the students who
are in this entity in this box come out better
as a result of it, not just knowing the
stuff that I'm trying to stop into their heads,
but actually thinking better about how to continue to think
about the stuff. So it's not ending the course
, closing the book, taking it back to the
bookstore, it's getting to the end of the class
and going, wow, I have a whole lot
more, I need to think about and I need
to think about it in the context of this and
this and this and I need to rethink these things
as I rethink this stuff too. So it's it's
I guess I would like to be remembered as someone
who has tried to prompt people to rethink what we
do both as and within our own profession, but
as a grander hole of what do we how do
we rethink what we do in education? And I
don't know if I'll be remembered for that or just
being a crazy old lady who shows up periodically and
goes, you know about that. I honestly think
I would like to I'd like I've always wanted to
revolutionized education. I don't think I'll be known as
the revolutionary in education, but I think I've tried
to make others think about how they can change and
I guess that's more important to me. Is there
something I have an asset we'd like to shoot?
I think what we need to do as a profession
is stop being so damn serious about ourselves. I
think we need to really stop dwelling on the seriousness
of it and learn how to have fun with it
. When I first started working with these computers,
I had fun and my kids and my hip fun
. Um, I got so that I was like
, every day was a new, exciting adventure.
I'm I'm not a gamer where I was playing games
with the kids because I was trying to figure out
what kinds of things you can do with this.
Um, I was trying to always explore it and
change it and do things that and use it in
different ways. Um, I had one day I
had my superintendent and a bunch of visitors were walking
through the building and I had the computer lab of
two computers in the back of my classroom at that
point. And um one of the kids was back
there when he was playing frogger and he was trying
to get this little thinking across the highway, you
know, with all these obstacles and you know,
you have to try over again and you turn points
if you could jump over things or if you get
past things and you kept turning these little points and
the principal came, are the superintendent came up because
you've got the kids playing games? I said,
ask him, He said, what do you mean
? I said ask him what the objective is.
I used to play poker with the kids a lot
to back on my speech therapy days. I used
to play poker a lot with the kids five card
draw. And one day principal came in and she
looked at me and I said we're working on articulation
. She said okay and we had to bet but
the betting had was in specific to that particular trials
speech problem. So the child with the s problem
could only bet certain amounts or certain kinds of things
that dealt with s. Words that began with the
ssl I had another one within our problem and he
could only bet with words that began with the R
. Sound. And so we were working on our
specific sounds but we were playing poker now I'm sure
the parents weren't really thrilled that I was teaching them
five card draw but engage the kids in this experience
and I had fun to me speech therapy was the
most boring thing anyone could do. No offense to
S. L. P. S. But to
me it was the most boring thing if we're sitting
there going, okay, we've done the list.
See Sons Sue. That's not fun. And it
doesn't make it fun for the kids. And it
certainly wasn't making fun for me to be able to
take something and just have fun with it and play
with him. And I think that's, we take
ourselves too seriously. I think we need to learn
to have fun and I think we need to learn
how to take that fun and to use it in
meaningful ways. And I don't know if you ask
me that question before or not, but I felt
like I needed to say that. Yes. Thank
you the answer. Thank you so much for sharing
today. Well, thank you, thank you for
the invitation.