I did all the work for my workshop presentation and then I came home and I’ve practically avoided all technology for two weeks. 

Diagnosis: A mild case of techno burnout.

It can be great, practical and timesaving.  It can also be a black hole for my time.So now I am looking for my happy medium. 

My webcam is installed, I’ve used it once, and I have plans to use it once or twice this week.  Check.

I’ve updated my classroom website, I’ve been meaning to for two weeks.  I had to edit pictures to blur the faces of the children.  We also just had a really fun and busy couple of weeks in the classroom.  But now that’s done.  Check.

I found some good kidspiration templates that I tweaked a little for my students and added a cool website link to one.  Great tech lesson! Check.

I am working on my first blog post in a few weeks.  Check.

Have been using my Google calendar to organize my most dreaded time of year – end of school year.           

     Hmm.  Spring fever – probably an underlying cause to my techno burnout – actually it’s probably a bit of life burnout.  My husband is currently working out of state.  He’s been gone this time for about two and a half weeks and doesn’t return for another two and a half weeks.  Add to that the end of the year classroom to do items, one daughter in dance class and another in soccer, not to mention homework!  Oh, and yes, my youngest (4) has been tantruming again – I’ve been lucky, no teeth marks yet!

NO WONDER I FEEL BURNT OUT!

So, now what to do?  Prioritize!  My Ning activities – bare minimum.  Twitter- it’s been calling my name, but I have to put it aside – that black hole thing I was talking about, so it gets the least amount of my time right now.  I think all those awesome links I love to follow were leading to my feeling of being overwhelmed.  So twitter is very limited, mostly just what I see on BeTwittered when I check my iGoogle. 

Now I need to breathe deep.  I just realized that just the process of writing this down helps me to identify what’s going on.  There’s a great reason for blogging – public journaling of your thoughts.  Could save people thousands of dollars they would otherwise pay a shrink (grins).

I was chatting with my girlfriend yesterday and telling her how my web/technology knowledge has tripled in just the past six months.  Now that I’m not taking any grad classes, now can I fill up my time questing for knowledge.  I shared with her about my webpage, my new blog, my nings and how much I adore twitter.  

 Tonight I participated in my first Women of Web 2.0 live chat at http://www.edtechtalk.com/.  I saw so many names of people I follow at twitter.  Some of my “tech heroes” were there, Jen Wagner, MariaK and more.  I listened to everyone, and boy, did I feel out of my league.  I have SO much to learn! 

Will I ever have enough time to learn everything I need?  But then, perhaps I need to think about what I am using and not worry about the rest right now.  My next immediate goal is to get a webcam so that I can start using Skype.  Hopefully I will have it in a week or two.  My class really misses our classmate who moved to Germany at Christmas time.   

As far as Moodle, Yugma and some of the other things that were mentioned in the chat.  I’m not going to race to learn it all.  I want to effectively use what I know, learn a little more and enjoy the day in and day out activities of my kindergarten class.  Perhaps sometimes I get a little too caught up in the technology.  I need to be a great teacher first, but one who effectively uses some cool technology.