When I was finishing up my teaching degree back in 19...uh...mmm...a while ago, and was preparing for my first classroom experience as a student teacher at Henry Clay High School, my advisor at the University of Kentucky sat me down to talk about what my post-degree goals and concerns should be. "Your first year as a teacher, you'll be acutely aware of yourself. You'll wake up from nightmares where you're poorly (or under!) dressed in front of your students, you've lost something important, or you've done something that made you look completely silly or irrelevant. In year two, you'll start to be aware of the mathematics - your dreams will be more about not being able to answer questions, or forgetting something you were supposed to teach. In year three, you'll finally notice that there are, in fact, students in the room."

...Of course, his charge to me, at that meeting, was to speed up the timeline.

None of us would like to admit that, in our first years as a teacher, we struggled with the concept of paying attention to student needs. Caring about, and being effective with, your students require that you are confident enough to get out of yourself, and listen to what is going on around you. Of course, there's always one new teacher who "hit the ground running" - whose poise and skill was evident from the first day they entered the classroom. However, for the rest of us, confidence is won through experience, hard work, and constant self-evaluation. The only way to truly speed up the process is by forcing ourselves to practice our skills at every opportunity, and to be honest and attentive to the results.

So it is with technology use and integration. There are always "geeks" - folks who have no problem learning new tools, and for whom the prospect of using those tools in a classroom inspires nothing scarier than a good night's sleep. For the rest of us, experience and confidence are won the hard way. There are, of course, a few ways we can speed up the learning curve...

• Use a new tool even when you're happier or faster with an old one. Remember those first few days with touch-typing? If you had listened to your fingers and head, you would have quit right then! If you stuck it out, you probably no longer even think about how much neater and faster committing words to a page is!
• Learn from whoever will teach. One of the wonderful things about a general sense of confidence is that it relieves you of the responsibility of being an expert on everything. Once that corner is turned, your students will often be quite willing and able to provide help. Let them!
• Share the responsibilities. As a high school teacher now with K-12 responsibilities, I am always shocked to find out how many elementary classroom teachers are collaborating with each other. High school teachers tend to just close the door! But no matter where you are, you can probably find a teacher with which to collaborate - one who has more experience, skill, and confidence than you do.

But those ideas aren't enough. In order for our experiences to build confidence, we have to be paying attention to them. Gone are the days when we can simply drop our students off at the computer lab, and let some "specialist" take care of the technology training! Since all of the responsibilities for learning are on our heads (and that includes responsibilities for our own learning!), we must gain the benefit from the technology use, just as our students do. After all, when it comes to preparing our students for their lives after Fayette County, there is a limit to how much good decisions and good help can contribute to change. At some point, we have no choice but to be changed ourselves!

But, just as many of you managed to graduate from hunt-and-peck typists, experience and skill builds confidence, and confidence increases use. And, hopefully, three years is longer than we need to be confident in our technology use. After all, there are only so many nightmares of humiliation we should be required to endure!

        --Jeffrey L. Jones, Editor