What is guiding your technology use?

This may or may not come as as surprise to you:

I enjoy sharing the ideas, lessons, and resources I find with others. Recently I have been using twitter to share those things .... a bunch!!

So in my email one day this week, I got a message from a high school teacher with this in the subject: Thanks for your Tweets!

That subject line made me wonder what the message would say:
Thanks for tweeting all of the things you do.  On Friday, you inspired me to go to Wonderopolis and find a good Super Bowl-themed lesson!

That email made me smile and made me want to know more about what from Wonderopolis inspired him and more about the Super Bowl-themed lesson. Since I like to ask questions ... I wrote him back and said I was interested and would like to know more.

Here is his response:
Well, the simple story is:
We had Senior Day on Friday, so I was only going to have 15 students of 26 in my class during 4th period.  There weren't going to be enough students to have a full-blown lecture on content, but we had to so something productive for 90 minutes (and hopefully fun, too).

Enter Wonderopolis.   After your many tweets on Wonderopolis, I finally decided to check it out.  I went to the site and searched for the Super Bowl.  One of the results that came back was a link to Super Bowl history and tickets.  I decided to make the class use the link as a guide to design their own ticket for the Super Bowl.  

Using PowerPoint, my students included the items I required--game logo, date, stadium, seat/row/section and bar code.  The rest of the design was up to them.  My students uploaded their finished assignments to Edmodo to be graded, then walked around the room to see what everyone else came up with.  Back on Edmodo, my students voted on the Super Bowl ticket they liked the best; the winning designer received extra credit on his assignment.

(Wow was all I could say!)

Scott Armstrong teaches Sports and Entertainment Marketing at a North Forsyth High School.  He is letting student instruction guide his technology use rather than the other way around. He figured out what lesson and project he wanted the students to do .... and then decided what technology pieces would work best to accomplish that task (sounds a little like TPACK).

Look at how many ways he was able to use technology with his students .... he used a website as inspiration, a program for students to create/design, and then a contained social media outlet for them to share what they produced.

Scott said that my sharing about Wonderopolis and things I have found there is what encouraged him to even go look at the site.  That made me realize that it was not necessarily something specific that I share but it was just how I keep sharing so I guess I will keep on sharing!

This also helped me to realize how much I need to tell people when something they do (intentional or not) inspires me to do something! It also encourages me to keep sharing the things that I find interesting since I never know what might inspire someone to do something.

Inspiration is all around us and although something may not inspire you, there is no telling how it will inspire someone else ...

In this collage created using Vuvox, you will find the project inspiration, assignment, finished products, and the winning ticket is at the end!