Reflection on my Personal Life

I was not able to attend the quarterly meeting, so in place of that I am writing in response to this question:
1. Learning is changing...How is your learning changing? What roled does technology play in your learning culture?
2. What does your personal/professional network look like? How are you connecting, collaborating, and creating? Consider: what role does technology play in your networking process? What role could technology play?

I am choosing to answer these questions in reference to my personal life. With everything going on, and as much time as I put into my teaching vocation, I realize that I am not spending a lot of time reflecting on my personal life. Technology naturally plays a huge role in my life, it is the "way of today".

1. My learning is changing daily in my professional life, as a mother, as a daughter, as a wife and as a contributing member of our community. I am learning how to become better at all of these, and that my experiences make me better at all of these thing. Experiences really do shape our futures! Becoming a mother has been the most amazing event, and learning how to be a good parent is the most challenging role I feel that I can ever have (and balancing this with work can be difficult to say the least). I have to ask myself "am I disciplining right?", "did I just set the wrong example?", "can I teach her in a better way?". It is a lot to think about, but that is how learning changes. We learn from those experiences how to do it "better" the next time.

2. If I were to paint a picture of my personal/professional network, it might look like a huge montage of experiences and snapshots of the important people in my life (both personal and professional), the experiences that make me a better person, and the things I rely on. This montage would be created on one canvas, which would represent the blank canvas of Rachel. I started with a blank canvas and all of these things and people would eventually make up my network.

I do rely on technology a lot in communication at school as well in my personal life. I am a facebooker, however I have considered disconnecting from it. I like it because it allows me to hear about my daughters day at daycare, it allows me to communicate with my art club students, I can share pictures with long distance relatives, I can find long lost relative and friends, and I and can learn about what is going on in others' lives. However, I get annoyed with the information that people think is important to share. Do we really need to hear what people are eating? I have weighed the pros and cons, and decided it is in my best interest to stay connected with facebook, but choose not to read a lot of what goes on there. Technology has really changed the way people communicate.

My dad is a non-user of technology (as non-user as they get these days). I have tried to encourage him to skype with use so that he can see his grand-daughter grow up, bill his customers with a printed invoice, text, etc. He refuses to accept these ways. He might have a good point here, "I want my grand-daughter to remember me and our time together, not my on a computer screen." Through texting, cell phones, social networks, RSS feeds, etc., etc., etc. we are able to FEEL connected to everything, but we should ask ourselves, "Would it be better to just see these people in person?"