I went to Masscue in November and one of the presenters, Will Richardson, challenged us, as teachers, to live more in the digital world by creating and reading more blogs, and developing a virtual community peopled with the teachers we need and want. It sounds an awful lot like what they told me when I was studying yoga a long time ago. When you need a teacher the right teacher will appear.

I find it so compelling, as a teacher, to have discussions about how children learn differently and what we need to teach them to prepare them for a very different future than what we experienced. Hall Davidson was a keynote speaker and talked about the fact that I Q scores have risen substantially over the past years and that students learn differently. One powerful example that he showed was a clip of Dr. Kildare. We watched as Kr. Kildare helped a woman by applying a tourniquet. It appeared almost slow motion compared with what we generally see on television today. Then he showed a clip of House and described the plotline. I cannot recreate the plotline. It was too complicated. And when Dr. House talked about the case he used high level medical terms that we would not understand but it created a backdrop for the story. The story was written in a way that the viewer could make enough assumptions to understand the story.

One example in our school recently was a student that emailed his teachers saying that he was recognizing that he was having trouble with organization and wanted to email homework in. One of his teachers wrote back suggesting that he try that for a while and gradually try to transfer that organization skill to hard copy. It is a great plan and helps him develop skills with both approaches. But this young man is an example of a true “digital native”, a child who has grown up with computers and finds it more comfortable to deal in the digital world than the physical world.

The bottom line is that as teachers we need to live in a digital world if we are to understand how students approach the world. For me, that means I need to go back to a lot of those Web 2.0 sites and really start using them as tools. I need to start a blog, podcasts and wikis, use Delicious to explore the web, and have the students respond to blog posts on a regular basis It is an interesting journey we are on.