Learning New Tech

Wow! The presentations from Wednesday are making me think about one thing in particular - how do I become paperless? And how do I do it yesterday? There are so many great ways to communicate with students and assess student learning without a million scraps of paper flapping about me like killer moths. Our presentations on Wednesday night made that all the more clear.

So let's go back two weeks...to when a river was unleashed in my building. Torrents of muddy water flowed up through the cafeteria floor as if our building might just be built upon some ancient, sacred burial ground. It was poltergeist level weirdness! I'm lucky that I am on the second floor. I'm lucky that my entire room wasn't destroyed and that I didn't, like many teachers, find myself utterly displaced. However, I did find myself partially displaced. I had "homeless" teachers teaching in my room during my plan and after sixth hour, so during the time that I usually grade, and check my email, and get organized, I was just grabbing stacks of papers and roaming my building looking for a quiet place to work, but by the time I Found a place to work, and chit-chatted with 5 to 10 people I met along the way, and got logged in, it was time to get back to my room or leave for the day. At some point, I even lost a stack of vocab exercises along the way. It was a very frustrating two weeks. But this experience pointed out to me how much easier this all would have been had I had a paperless classroom. As I watched Cindy Nordyke's Showbie presentation, I imagined that my life would have been exponentially simplified had I just had an iPad to pack around with me instead of 20 stacks of papers half hazardly paper clipped together. What if all of my assignments were online? My grammar reviews? My vocab exercises? My tickets out of the door? The Nearpod app showed me ways I could use iPads in my classroom to check student learning in class. This seems like an amazing review tool to keep students engaged in class. And I can check their answers in real time. The Apple TV also seemed incredibly useful. I actually used one the following day during my department meeting. I showed my department how they could grade online using Turnitin.com, and how they could use the Apple TV to instruct as they work the room. There are so many beautiful Edtech things happening and evolving, so....the big question is...why aren't we using them?  We have 70 iPads sitting in our library loaded with a variety of educational apps, so why aren't we using them?Clearly, poltergeist flood or not, this stuff would be making our lives easier.

If there is one thing that the presentations taught me, it's that, as teachers, perhaps especially high school teachers, we don't have a clue about how to utilize all the beautiful technology that is out there waiting for us. We don't know where to begin! You can buy 100 or 1000 iPads for a school, but if teachers haven't been trained to use them in a useful way, then we are wasting our very limited resources. There is some great and useful Edtech out there, and I feel as though I'm really lucky that I am getting the opportunity to learn about it, but it just shouldn't be that way. All of us should be getting these opportunities, not just the 32 of us enrolled in the cohort. There is a disconnect going on in our buildings. We need to be utilizing our PD time to teach teachers how to use this stuff. We need to be asking our more adventurous teachers if they would be on a team to take on using Showbie and other applications to implement paperless classrooms for a year. If we truly believe in our mission statement, then we have a reponsibility to train our teachers to prepare all of those students for that ever changing society that is looming out there. As a teacher, I can tell you, we are ready to do this, but, as a district, we are going to have to spend some time and money and energy in leading our teachers in the right direction.