Think Like a Teacher

I recently combed through thousands of pages on TeachersFirst‘s servers in preparation for the launch of TeachersFirst 3.0. I whirled as thirteen years of teaching with technology rewound in a few clicks. Yes, we have revised our site several times since 1998, but we have never cleaned out the attic of unused items. As points of perspective, 1998 was the year TeachersFirst launched. It was also the year of Titanic (the movie) and the introduction of Viagra. Today’s younger teachers were still in elementary school. If you were a teacher then, you likely had to walk to the school library or designated classrooms to even find a computer. Fortunate schools had one projection device that sat atop an overhead projector to “show” the computer on a screen. Do you remember?

As I clicked through TeachersFirst’s digital attic, I laughed aloud at a 1998 TeachersFirst tutorial on Netscape, complete with images and explanations of what a “Back” button does.  I unearthed a page that explained “plug ins” (not the kind that deliver air freshener). I blew digital dust off technology tips about “floppies” and  warnings from the days before school web filtering, recalling the humble roots of the iPad and IWB.  A very thorough 2001 TeachersFirst professional module explained a new concept in teaching: the webquest. Of course, there were no user-friendly, web-based tools to create or share a webquest online, so teachers placed the instructions and links in Word documents or learned to write html code and host it on their Tripod or AOL member web page. Only the adventurous teacher-geeks survived that trial by ftp.

Then there were TeachersFirst traffic statistic pages. Like a box of old snapshots,  these pages showed how many teachers accessed how many “page views” on TeachersFirst during September, 2003: a mere 143,000 per month in those days, and zero percent of them were from countries outside the U.S. What about today, you ask? Try millions of pages viewed per month from over 70 countries with users and members visiting TeachersFirst. Everyone is a web adventurer now. Indeed, the web itself ceased being an adventure many years ago.

Where were you thirteen years ago this month? Did you use the Internet? My classroom was the first in my school to hijack one of the extra office phone lines and connect to the Internet via a dial-up modem– I believe in 1995 or so. The cable ran all the way down the hall, strung behind the panels of the dropped ceiling during a weekend visit by my geeky friend, the computer teacher, with his handy roll of telephone wire. If the office picked up Line 4 during our online session, we were unceremoniously thrown off. I would leap to the computer before the kids could hear what the principal was saying to the person on the other end of the call.

So I should not have been surprised to find several generations of digital treasures in TeachersFirst’s attic. But we should all be impressed at how far teachers — and the world– have come in 13 years.  I gleefully tossed many, many old and unused pages to the “permanently delete” list as we decided what was worth revising and keeping. I can only hope that the next few years will see at least as much change in the power of teaching and learning thanks to the web.

In just a few weeks, we will be unveiling TeachersFirst 3.0. I hope you will find it as fresh and exciting as the Internet was back in 1998, but without the challenges!