 This story starts out here somewhere on an isolated West Texas road that connects El Paso, Texas to Carlsbad, New Mexico Highway 62 180 is what the locals call it. They also call it the Carlsbad highway There's not much out here except for some mountains some brush and An occasional abandoned building When this road was built cars didn't get 400 miles to a tank In fact a good tank full would get you a hundred miles or so So roads like this had lots of gas stations and small little motels Now they are pretty much lost to history Save for a few that still exist as anomalies For the most part, however, they have been abandoned and are waiting for the elements to reclaim them Most people that come through this area zoom through as fast as they possibly can to get to their destinations The speed limit is 70 but most use that as a starting point a suggestion It is long it is straight and there are rarely any type of law enforcement So if you ever wanted to put the pedal to the metal this highway would be the place to do it I like to stop in places like these and take pictures because sometimes those things that you think are not pretty Can turn into something amazing. It was in one of those places Where I found this story The place a long ago been abandoned and long ago decided that mother nature should take over It was an old gas station and restaurant and it looked pretty grim on the inside and the outside Lots of broken bottles broken floorboards and well it was well beyond the fixer upper stage While I was looking around for a shot. I came across a scrawled message on a wall the message read Phil Goddard of London England slept here while walking from New York to Los Angeles to raise money for cancer research February 24th 2007 thanks for the free accommodation It was a bit drafty, but beggars can't be choosers Out here in the middle of nowhere on a wall that probably only one or two people a year would even see I found that little message Who was Phil Goddard? Why was he out here in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert in the middle of the winter in? 2007 why was he raising money for cancer research? It seemed too unusual to be a random silly graffiti like was on the rest of the building Who was here in an abandoned building on a lonely stretch of West Texas highway that I finally came to the conclusion that we're all Connected even when we think we're not Something about that scrawled little note made me wonder longer than I normally would have for something that I'd seen like that For the first time And for the first thing it was written. Well, it made sense. It had humor to it I went back to my home after I finished my trip that day and decided to look up who Phil Goddard was Was he alive? What was that cancer story? Why was he staying in such a place? Could I connect with him? Amazingly enough, I found a record of his fundraising walk across America Phil was a London based translator When his wife was diagnosed and eventually died from cancer He decided to raise funds in her memory by walking 3,000 miles from New York to California That stop on highway 62 180 was just one of many along the way How did I know that? Because he blogged about it He left an electronic diary of his journey and he wrote about staying in that abandoned building on a particular night in February 2007 Tuesday February 27th 2007 El Paso, Texas 2270 miles. I was expecting the four-day walk across the Chihuahua desert to El Paso To be an ordeal and it was but not in the way I'd expected. The big problem was the wind It started as I had made the steep 6,000-foot ascent to the Guadalupe Mountains south of Carlsbad Normally the stroller just rolls quietly and uncomplaining along and I hardly noticed it's there But with a powerful desert wind blowing in my face and laden with four days food and 11 liters of water Pushing it uphill was a Sisyphian task I had to keep pausing for breath and my pace slow to a crawl At the summit I dropped in on the Guadalupe Mountains Visitor Center a haven of clean restrooms and piped classical music Amid the wilderness They had a little weather station and I asked what was the peak gust that had been in the past 24 hours They told me it was 80 miles an hour, which is hurricane force It went on like that for the next four days It's still blowing here in El Paso Though not nearly as hard and I will probably it'll probably be a problem all the way across New Mexico and Arizona As a result instead of being pleasantly tired as I am at the end of most AIDS I am exhausted and dehydrated on the plus side while this has been the most challenging section of the walk It's also been easily the most spectacular start mountain outcrops cactus studded dunes soft brown grass rippling across like an ocean It's also been the most solitary few days since I started my walk Drivers tend to set the cruise control at the 75 mile per hour speed limit Surprisingly generous for a narrow two-lane road and go into a trance as Witness the many sad little crosses heaped with plastic flowers I saw along the way commemorating people who presumably fell asleep at the wheel Usually I get a steady trickle of people stopping to chat and offer me rides and this helps me get through the day But there were none this time so I had to put my brain in the equivalent of cruise control and walk as long and as Hard as I could to get over and get it done Yesterday, I covered 32 miles, which is a record for me. I Last came to El Paso in 1978 when it was a dusty border town home to 600,000 people Today, it's a huge sprawl with more than twice the population and some of the most high density housing I've seen in the country El Paso and its sister town of Juarez in Mexico are really just one big conglomeration two worlds separated by a fence a bit like pre-1989 Berlin I'm hoping to go and have a look at Juarez tomorrow After I learned about Phil I blogged about his journey I wrote that I had no idea where he is now and what he was doing But I had an idea that he met someone along the way and he was happy I didn't think much more about that entry until I got this response Hi Tim, I mentioned your story on Facebook and my next-door neighbor said I should post this which is from Mardi Gras this year I'm the flamingo and Pam the wife. I met on my walk is the woman in blue Best wish is Phil Attached was a picture of Phil and his new bride whom he met while walking across America Guess where he ended up. Yeah, New Orleans, and I'm pretty sure that's Phil in the flamingo outfit So, why am I telling you this? Because while the story of Phil Goddard and me as an extreme example of making connections It illustrates something every educator needs to know We are all connected every single one of us While we may not think we are and some of us even try to hide from it The fact is we are all globally connected And it's time we get our kids ready to live in a connected world The question is how can we prepare our kids to live in a connected world if we ourselves are not connected Can a math teacher teach math if they don't understand math? Can a science teacher teach science if they do not understand science? Have we ever been in a meeting and someone proudly announces that they simply do not have the internet at home that they Disconnect when they're at home. How can you do that? How can you only be connected at work? Is that the same as saying I'm only a teacher when I'm in my classroom? How can we talk about working collaboratively if we ourselves do not work collaboratively? How can we ask our students to do things like blog and use wikis when we don't do that ourselves? So how connected are we exactly? Let's look just at smartphones as an example The fact of the matter is that we're all connected you me Phil Goddard the teachers in other cities The students in other states and countries You could have found out about Phil Goddard just as easy as I did The issue is not whether we're connected. We are as Up today when I reported this there were 1.7 billion smartphones being used on the planet earth That does not count laptops desktops game devices or tablets in 2013 Morgan Stanley said that there were 8.7 billion devices connected to the internet That's more internet connected devices than there are people on the planet by 2020 that number is expected to be 75 billion devices connected to the internet So it's not an issue of whether we can be connected The only issue is whether we choose to be connected and teachers that are not connected. Well Do they allow their students to be connected? In my district we've begun rolling out a bring your own device initiative Why because we understand that students are using their own devices at home Secretly at school and instead of fighting the winds of change. Why not let the winds blow us where we want us to go? We want our students to use technology. We want our students to connect to other students. We want our students to work collaboratively So why not take that device that one that will Richardson once said contains a sum total of human knowledge in a device The size of a pack of cards and let them explore the academic world Not just the world of YouTube goofy music videos So we really are all connected and there are many ways to get connected if you're not start reading some blogs There are tons of them out there Here's my favorite Follow some cool educators on Twitter like Tim Holt 2007 he's awesome unless that you might think I'm some kind of narcissist the trick to using social media for professionals like you is To follow others that are just like you that have the same professional likes and interests don't waste time on following Celebrities or people that can't improve your professional life If you saw a speaker at a conference start following them on Twitter, you need to choose wisely Just like Indiana Jones We can choose to drive down the road by yourself or we can drive with our friends We're all connected Me Phil Goddard and you I hope that you choose to connect Not only yourself, but your students and your teaching I guarantee it's worth the trip