Making time to play with technology

It's been a while since I've posted and part of the reason is definitely about making time. I REALLY need to integrate blogging into my daily/weekly practice. Since I last posted, blogspot have also changed the format for constructing an entry, so I'll definitely need to relearn what to do, as it's been a bit of a struggle this evening. This ties in with the issue I've been thinking about over the last few months (since buying myself a smartphone), which is the need to simply make time to just 'play around' with the technology and not focus too much on the purpose of use ('functional fixedness'?) particularly if I'm going to really maximise (ultimately) the functionality and affordances new technology has to offer. It reminds me of a book title by Michael Schrage called 'Serious play' (which is actually a book about innovation and creativity in business)but the message is the same, that playing with technology and exploring, fairly randomly way, what it can do is a serious business/pursuit and I need to keep reminding myself of this. Since starting this blog have come across some really interesting new tools /applications that have real potential to support teaching and learning. There are also some great blogs dedicated to exploring learning technologies, such as Nik Peachey's Learning Technology Blog and his review of 10 tech tools for teacher training (among other things) which I intend to check out in the coming weeks.