Inspiring through Ignorance

As the technology integrationist for my campus, it is quite literally my job to be the inspiration for others to embrace digital learning.  The best way I have found to do this is to make sure my learners - students and teachers both- see me as a learner.   Very rarely do I lead a lesson or PD where I’m not asked a question that I can’t answer. When that happens, either I ask the students to try to answer the question themselves or I let them see me finding the answer.  Just this week I was facilitating a training for new laptops being deployed to teachers in my district and was bemoaning the fact that the touchpad scrolls the ‘wrong’ way (I’m a die-hard Chromebook user). One of the participants in the training said,  “You know, you can switch that in the settings.” 5 years ago, I would have been very self-conscious that there would be whispers of “I can’t believe she didn’t know that”, but instead I enthusiastically said “Really?!?! I can’t wait to figure that out!”  I try to make finding out new information  a celebration to encourage others to embrace what they DON’T know. 
In my PBL innovation plan, connecting formal to informal learning will be extremely important.  It’s necessary to make this connection so that students have agency - the informal learning is what makes it fun and interesting for them, the formal learning is the required curriculum that students can’t discover on their own.  The hard part is looking at a standard and determining what parts need to be taught formally and then designing and connecting informal learning opportunities.