Think Like a Teacher

As a teacher, I am thankful for:

An orphaned pack of construction paper discovered at the back of the cupboard — unfaded!

A parent who asks, “What can I do to help?”

Free online tools without a “what’s popular” button,

Friday nights,

Going home on empty-tote-bag days,

Drive-through anything,

Other parents of my child’s soccer team or Sunday School class who volunteer instead of me,

A box of Kleenex donated anonymously on my desk,

Neon colored paper,

Free anything,

Each successful program, concert, field trip, performance, science fair, etc. that went off without a crisis,

Email when I need to contact someone,

An empty email box when I have no time to read email,

Each time I use laptops with my students and they all connect to the Internet on the first try,

My fellow teacher who shows me how it fix it when something doesn’t work,

The polite student who fixes it for me,

Being able to save interactive whiteboard files so we can continue tomorrow or email it home to a sick student,

Students who stay home when they are sick,

Being able to try a lesson a second time to fix what I messed up the first time,

My fellow teachers who help me laugh at myself after a disastrous lesson,

Finding a web resource before I need it for a unit, not after,

Students who said “Thank you” today,

Students who say “Thank you” years later.

What are you thankful for?

As Thanksgiving approaches, I thought it appropriate to talk about the blessings of educational technology for which we should all be thankful.

I talked with several teachers this week about what concerns them most as they plan a technology-infused activity or project with their students. As part of an OK2Ask online professional development “snack session” TeachersFirst conducted, we asked teachers, both preservice and experienced, what challenges they encounter in these activities.

The sampling of attendees in these online sessions came was a non-scientific one, comprised of about 25 preservice folks: teacher-interns, undergrad and graduate level teacher certification candidates,  and about 25 current classroom teachers.  The results knocked me down with a wave of deja vu. Almost every teacher currently in the classroom emphasized concern over availability and reliability of the hardware and Internet connection needed to do the activity. The 25 newbies voiced similar concern along with general management and planning issues.

When I moved full time into a role as an instructional technology specialist/technology integrator about ten years ago, this was the cry I heard from teachers. Before that, when I was just another teacher trying to convince fellow teachers to try using the Internet, the cry was the same.  Has nothing changed? Even in schools blessed with better-than-average facilities, the demand is higher, so the barriers grow proportionately. Will we ever get past the wall of “I can’t get the (reliable) computer time I need”? Is this barrier real or perceived? Has this complaint become a habit, or do teachers still have trouble with the Internet going down mid-class? My experience was that if a lesson”failed” once, it took ten times the effort to convince that teacher to try again. And I can’t say that blame them. It is a nightmare to have thirty eighth graders off task while you trouble-shoot the wireless or make up new directions on the fly because the Internet is glitchy. And you end up planning two lessons: the ideal and the back-up.

So where are the blessings here? In the last ten years, the students have come to the rescue. We are blessed with kids who can help figure things out. We are blessed that the demand has grown to use technology in the schools. We are blessed that bandwidth has improved dramatically,  even in poorer schools, but so has demand.  With every blessing comes another barrier. When a Humpty Dumpty of a lesson idea falls down, we have better tools to rebuild him, but he will probably fall off his new and improved wall again and again. We can rebuild our bionic Humpty Dumpty over and over. New barrier, new fall, new blessing. Teaching really hasn’t changed. We just have faster-evolving blessings and barriers these days.

For the past 18 months or so, I have been a big fan of a certain web 2.0 tool that allowed students to create online books that could be viewed interactively and shared by URL. In a big email push this past week, they revised their user agreement. I read it carefuly, but even my skeptical eye did not catch the fact that they had removed the capability to see the book interactively unless you are actually logged into that “personal” account. No longer can teachers have students create books and share them electronically with family and friends at no cost. No longer can teachers create interactive ways for students to understand new content. No longer can all the teachers to whom we have “plugged” this tool use it with their classes in any functional way.

Some of the other changes related to content ownership are even more disturbing, but this one is the deal breaker right up front. If it is not free, TeachersFirst cannot review and recommend it. The sad thing is that I thought their business model MIGHT actually work: provide the tool for free, but ask parents and teachers to pay if they wanted a printed copy of the book. In an ordinary economy, it should have worked. Seeing your child’s (or grandchild’s) clever writing would be enough for parents to shell out the bucks. The school library or a teacher  might select the very best books created by a class for actual printing and permanent display on school shelves. Even in an era where reading has become more and more electronic and less tactile, people can be overcome by the urge to make a moment in a child’s life “permanent.” It should have worked.

But the economy strikes again. So we will be removing mention of this once-amazing tool for scaffolded or open writing experiences from over 80 reviews on TeachersFirst. Instead of recommending that students create online books, we will recommend another content-authoring tool…until that one dies, too. Let’s hope the economy improves before it sucks all creativity out of learning. There are enough forces at work trying to do just that. Economics should not be one of them.