Throughout my 22 year teaching career, I have always counted myself a learner along with my students.  I began the journey exploring my great love of bilingual, multi-age education, working with dynamic, creative youth who kindly helped me build my Spanish language skills while I taught in Spanish our language immersion program.  How I loved these classes!  Since class was held in Spanish, we had to create all of the content ourselves.  We naturally approached topics of learning by student interest and student driven projects.

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Back in the day, I learned computer skills on an Apple 2E.  It was SO EXCITING to move up from the electric typewriter!  Within a couple of years, we had a couple of Mac Classics in the classroom; in time, a few iMacs.  We worked on programs like Math Blaster and Oregon Trail. How we loved Storyworks and Jumpstart programs!   Students and I started building content in word processing and KidPix. Woohoo!  We enthusiastically took turns printing up ‘fancy’ documents!  We created our own content in Spanish, though we couldn’t save it to any other device, even if we wanted to.  Still, we were having fun and learning tons!  But, back then, with limited tools and tech, creating content on paper by hand remained the fastest, surest way for everyone to produce quality, timely products and materials.  KidPix was not exactly Adobe, folks.  And, even though everyone had their own floppy disk, things were not easily transferrable or sharable.  Their own floppy disk- funny, how times have changed.

In 22 years I’ve taught every grade level K-6, sometimes in multi-age classes, sometimes single grades.  Over the years, there have been many debates about quality education and appropriate expectations for kids.  But one thing never changed for me:  People learn when they take a personal interest and engage their creativity.

Jump to 2016.  Easily for me, the best development in education has been the access to our wide, wonderful world through expanding technology!  These days we all have to stay on our toes keep up with tech, and my thoughtful, innovative students help me do just that!  Instead of a floppy disk, we have little powerful computers of our very own, stored in our back pockets!  It’s dreamy that we can investigate our interests and create content so easily in our classrooms and at home, then share it with people worldwide!  Edublogs is an outstanding format for learners to connect!  This is our first Student Blogging Challenge, and it’s so energizing to watch learners emerge and shine.  Thank you, Edublogs, for connecting classrooms worldwide.  This learning journey is a long and winding road, but I have my running shoes on – so glad we’re all on the trail together!