"Technology is a hassle."

I often hear educators grumbling that "technology is a hassle."  They're not necessarily opposed to technology, but they are under the false impression that it makes more work for them.  I understand that many educators don't have a lot of training in how to use the various technologies available to them (which is why I strongly advocate not only for the use of technology but for professional development so that educators can know how use technology effectively), but in many cases if they put in a little bit of time learning how to use some of the technology they would save themselves a lot of time in the long run.

I will now expose all these so called "reasons" technology is a hassle for the frauds they are.

Reason #1 - Nobody will ever look at my website/wiki/blog.

FALSE - If you make a website/wiki/blog and don't tell anyone about it and just assume they'll find it on their own by clicking on your name on the school website you're right.  If you tell students/parents/everyone about it and post things that are relevant on there and update it frequently people will indeed look at it and use it!

Reason #2 - It will lead to parents emailing/contacting me more frequently.

FALSE - Parents contact you more when information isn't available.  I teach freshmen, they have just moved up from the middle school where they were in a team setting and took classes with the same core group and had the same teachers. There was a lot of parent contact.  The high school is not set-up this way (nor should it be as far as I'm concerned), but for a lot of these students (and especially their parents) they undergo a transition period in which they're not sure what to expect.  This often results in frequent parent emails asking what the assignments are, what you're teaching their child in class, and what their child's current grade is, can they stay after, etc.  By posting this information on my website (and making the information known to parents) I save myself countless parent phone calls and emails in which I basically reiterate the same information.  Recently I gave all my students progress reports.  Instead of requiring the students to get them signed by their parents and return them to me (half of them you'll never see again regardless of how much nagging you do, and who knows how many of them have been forged) I sent an email home to all parents letting them know that I gave their child a progress report with all their grades on it and explained what would be allowed to made up.  I also encouraged parents to check out my website and explained that all homework assignments, tests, projects, due dates, etc are posted on there.  Want to know how many emails I got in response?  Two.  That's right, two parent emails, want to know what they said?  Thanks for the heads up.  On open house night last Thursday you want to know how many parents pestered me about their child's grade in my class?  One.  So lets use math skills now, two plus one equals three.  How many parents do you think would have swarmed me at open house night asking about their child's grade if I didn't send out that mass email?  Who knows.  When I was presenting my curriculum to the parents are explained about what was coming up I got very few questions.  At one point I said to them, "I'm really surprised you don't have more questions about what we do in world history."  A parent replied, "Oh, I read your website everyday, I already knew everything you went over."   

Reason #3 - It takes way too much time.

FALSE - Lets go back to reason #2; think of how many parent phone calls or emails you get a day.  How long does it take you to respond to those?  How much time does that take?  I guarantee once you get past the initial set-up of your blog/wiki/website you will never invest as much daily time in it as you would in responding to parent emails.  When a parent does email me and says, "What were the assignments for the last week when John was out?" instead of actually composing an entire email to them I simply respond with, "Please see my homework calendar and the two PowerPoints on the Nationalism and Industrial Revolution page, let me know if you have any questions."  It's very rare that I get emails like that from parents or students like that at all.  What happens most often is they return after absences with copies of the work they missed from the website and many times that work is completed.  At the beginning of a unit I spend about half and hour updating that page on my wiki.  At the end of every school day I spend maybe 5 minutes maximum updating my homework calendars. 

Reason #4 - There are plenty of ways to do things without technology.

FALSE - Of course there are.  Most things we do today were done prior to the invention of technology.  However, I wouldn't want to do a lot of things the way they were done before the technology was available.  Think of a hospital and all the technology they have.  Were there ways to save lives before the technology was available?  Yes, but I personally wouldn't want to have surgery without anesthesia and would rather have an MRI than unnecessary exploratory surgery.

Technology is everywhere.  It's not a fad, it's not going away.  The more an educator puts off using it the greater their learning curve will be when they finally do decide to learn or may be forced to learn.  Technology is not the root of all evil.  It wouldn't take over your life, it wouldn't make your life more difficult.  In fact it's likely it will make your life easier, a lot easier.  I've just given you four reasons why you should try something new.  There are dozens more, but that's a post for another day.

I made a prezi on nationalism!

How insanely cool is this?



If you go to prezi.com you can sign up for a free account (they give better free accounts to educators and students, so if you're one make sure you pick that option). I watched the introduction video and then created this. It was really fun to make, I think I'll show it to my students on Tuesday to kick off the nationalism unit.

An excellent post on technology and responsibility for educators.

The other day I came across this excellent post about why it is our responsibility as teachers to both use/teach with technology.  I share many of the same sentiments with the author.  At this point technology has never been more accessible to us and to our students.  I absolutely agree that it is our duty as educators to be using the best practices we can be to educate our students, in today's world best practices would be incorporating technology into our curriculum. 

I do realize there are some roadblocks that educators may encounter in trying to incorporate technology into their repertoire.  In some cases the school may not be able to provide teachers with SMARTBoards, data projectors, laptop carts, or the like.  However most schools now have at least one computer in the class room and a computer lab that is available for students to go to.  Many students now have internet access at home or can access it at their local library.  Students can be taught to effectively use the internet for research and other responsible uses.

I think especially in light of what's been going on lately with young adults and misuse of the internet it is even more important to be sure that we as educators are teaching them how to use this very powerful tool responsibly and appropriately in all facets of their lives and be positive role models of appropriate usage.

Exciting Developments

Entering my third year of teaching it's pretty exciting to look back on all the progress I've made, especially in terms of using technology in my classroom.  My first year my classroom had a television (with no VCR, DVD, or remote) and an overhead projector.  However, during this year I was introduced to SmartBoards.  I applied for (and received!) funding to get a SmartBoard for my classroom.

The SmartBoard was just the beginning.  Over the summer I took a class where I learned a lot about blogs and wikis.  I decided to go the wiki route and set-up a wiki for my classes.  My honors classes created their own usernames and began to post and have discussions on the wiki.  It wasn't perfect (I think I've worked out a lot of the flaws for this year) but it was pretty encouraging.

This year my mentor teacher Dan (who has always been very technologically inclined) showed me some pretty cool stuff he was having his students do with blogging.  I was extremely impressed, and insanely jealous!  His blogs had a lot of the outcomes I was hoping to achieve from using the wiki.  I was tempted to jump on the student blogging bandwagon right away, but after some discussion and thinking it through decided to hold off until second semester. 

My students will register on the wiki and begin posting soon.  This will at least get them acclimated to using the computer, logging into a site and posting.  Then second semester we will up the ante by having each student blogging independently (very different from a communal site like the wiki).

Although I already have a personal blog of my own (where I often talk about teaching) I'm starting this one specifically to document my trials and tribulations of using technology with my freshmen honors world history classes.  I figure this one can also be used as a reference/resource/model to my students when they begin blogging.

We'll see how it goes . . . but I'm pretty psyched, I'm really looking forward to second semester now!