Your Toolbox

Let's say you are in your junior year and you are in a construction trades class at Prosser. This is a great class, designed to help you in the future. The teacher assigns you a task. You have to build a treehouse. The teacher teaches you about the coolest tool… a hammer. You hammer and hammer and finish your treehouse.  Good job.

Your next assignment is to install a sink. That is a great project! You pull out your hammer. Somehow you install the sink but it was harder than it had to be and the end product wasn't very pretty. The hammer made dents all over the basin. But you got it done. Good job.

Your next assignment is to wire a room. Bringing electricity to room outlets is a great project. You pull out your hammer. Now it gets ugly. Your hammer won't bend the wires and you keep breaking the plastic outlet covers. You also get a little shock as you swing the hammer into a live wire. You don't finish the project. Bad job.

What are the similarities and differences with these projects? They are all construction projects. They all require tools. And you used a hammer every time. The hammer worked for some but not for all. It would have been nice to be able to use a wrench or a screwdriver. And a little more choice would have prevented the projects from being so boring.

Construction tools are like technology tools. One tool can get a lot of jobs done but one tool isn't the best thing to use every time. Using one tool every time is boring.

What are you doing to learn new tools? Have you experimented with VOKI? Youblisher? Big Huge Labs? Your teachers are going to work on some new tools later this week in their professional development sessions on Wednesday and Thursday.

When your teacher finishes his/her half day of training, ask "what did you learn today?" or "what's new in your toolbox?" Follow that up with "when can we use it in class?" It is hard work learning new tools, but it is so worth it.  Let's support each other as we all work to learn some new tools.