Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Tech

  • Let me tell you a story … about teaching and technology

    I’m teaching a class on creating a radio show and podcasting. I’m working with 11 enthusiastic and interested adult learners and I’m quite excited about it myself. Yesterday was our 2nd meeting.

    Let me tell you a little story about teaching and technology…

    My plan was 3-fold:

        Talk about commitment to the course
        Each person to choose which part of the show they would be working on (basically create work groups)
        Begin some research

    The first two parts were easy, the components were me and them. It was the last section that proved…challenging. And guess what? That last section involved a 10 minute presentation. It required technology. And the technology wasn’t cooperating. I realized it wasn’t cooperating an hour before the course so I did have time to place the presentation on individual laptops for students to view at their tables. The thing was, I wasn’t planning on needing headsets. There was audio. At one point in the presentation I say, “You must be fed up of hearing my voice by now …” When I heard it an asynchronous 6 times I laughed out loud and so did the students. It’s a good thing they have a sense of humour!

    Other little things… laptops kept logging out (need to remember to shut off the logout feature) during the class, some of them decided to do the Windows update thing and re-started mid lesson.

    Like I said, at least we all had a sense of humour and I knew what was going on nevertheless it was still very frustrating. I had spent a week preparing for this class, not a week straight but on and off for a week. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and it really should have gone off without a hitch but it didn’t.

    And. Capital A ‘And’ here… I am a technology consultant. I understand that things sometimes don’t work and the majority of the time I can work around that And still, I was met with this frustration.

    Computer RepairWhen teachers tell me their own stories of how technology trumped their lessons I know that they are less and less willing to try it again. It is frustrating to put so much time into something to have it fall apart because a wire is missing, a network is down, a button they don’t know about needs to be pushed, an ActiveX control needs to be allowed to run, a program needs to be updated, a this, a that.

    So where do we go from here?

    Is it about teaching teachers how to troubleshoot all of that? It would be nice if everyone knew how but I’m not sure if that is a very practical answer.

    The largest protest I hear from teachers about their day is that there is not enough time to do anything. We know that there isn’t. Teachers have so many responsibilities, a mere fraction of which is the hours of time where they are physically tied to their classrooms and the rest generally gets done on their own time. We know that. So throwing more training at them that requires them to use their precious out of class time in order to learn how to troubleshoot technology that they perhaps do not even want to use well…I think that is problematic.

    So again. Where do we go from here?

    For myself, I am in the process of creating a webpage for the course where I will drop any resources. I’ll be expecting the learners in the course to access any presentations there. It’s something they can do during class time, at home if they have computers, on their phones, whatever their preference or requirement. This way the theory won’t be trumped by the tech. As well, the class time will be reserved for collaboration, creation, and questions.

    But that is me. I teach one little course a week. And I am a technology consultant.

    Where do we go from here when it comes to working with educators and supporting them with not only the opportunities but the challenges of using technology in the classroom?

  • Adventures of a Paradigm Shifter

    Guest Post – an educational consultant and staff leader reflects on using an iPad for the first time. This post is cross-posted at Maria’s iPad Blog.

    Yes...

    The iPad came out of its box looking simple, unassuming and seemingly without controls – using this, I was promised, would become a “paradigm shift” for me: it would simplify my computer tasks when away from the office. I was dubious at best and not a little bewildered — you see, I was one of those (few?) who made it a point not to use a computer when not at work – yes, I’m a 50 something technical neophyte who uses a computer because I have to in my work as an educational consultant and staff leader in the Adult General Education programme at our centre. It was becoming obvious, though, that I needed another tool to help me easily access the ever-growing mass of documents and information overload when away from my desk — a different kind of laptop? I wondered (I envisioned myself easily clicking away on a slimmer, lighter version…). My director, however, convinced me to try a tablet instead…tablet? As in Moses and the tablets? Gaming tablets? (I felt like Moses!) So I did a bit of research and discovered that a tablet “combines the features and portability of a smartphone” (I have a cell phone, but it’s not one of the smart ones) “with the power of a laptop – the best of both worlds in one sleek device” — so there it was in front of me, a sleek device that I wasn’t sure what to do with.

    Moses and tablets
    Image from Contracast, click for source.
    In a previous mini-introduction to the iPad, I had learned that it used touch-screen capability so I anticipated problems for work-related use. Luckily, an important tool that helped me transition to using the iPad tablet was a separate keyboard – in my case, the Zagg 2012 version. Setting up the keyboard to “recognize” my iPad turned out to be satisfyingly easy (I accomplished this myself!), and after that, it looked like I had a mini-laptop in my hands.

    The first thing that really impressed me was how quickly my iPad turned on: a light press of the side button and a “slide to unlock” (though at first, being left-handed I tried to slide left…) revealed a screen full of intriguing “apps” (I had heard about those) such as “Notes,” “Calendar,” “Reminders,” “Camera,” and “Safari” – I started feeling optimistic…these sounded like promising allies in my technical adventure. I had been instructed to go to “Settings” and enter my password in order to access wireless internet at home and I was nervous about that…what if it didn’t work? But it did – the indicators were clear and simple. I was also encouraged to start exploring on my own, so I cautiously began: what better app to start with, I thought, than “Safari” — a light touch of the compass symbol and I was immediately brought to a screen that offered a Google search. Okay, then – what to look up first? I had just been talking to my husband, Gerry, at our kitchen table about how communication technology was changing so quickly (social networking and Twitter), and he expressed his view that even someone like F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my favorite writers) had been kind of “tweeting” almost a century ago, as evidenced in his notebooks. Notebooks? I had read all of his novels and short stories – how could I have missed his notebooks! So I typed in “Fitzgerald notebooks” and got a list of several options: I touched the entry “The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald” and was rewarded (at our kitchen table) with the complete text of this work! Also, I was able to manipulate the size of the print by touching the screen with two fingers and spreading or narrowing the distance between. Gerry had made an interesting point: Fitzgerald’s entries in his “Notebooks” were similar in nature to what you could find on Twitter today – reflections, comments, observations – imagine, I added, what he could have done with a tablet…

    postscript – the author tells me this post was written using Evernote on her iPad.

  • First day as RÉCIT consultant for general adult education

    Yesterday was (unofficially) my first day as a local RÉCIT consultant for general adult education.

    What does this mean? RÉCIT is a French acronym, standing for “réseau de personnes-ressources pour le développement des compétences des élèves par l’intégration des technologies.”

    (and now in English) What does this mean? “a network of resource people for the development of student competencies through the integration of technologies.” (definitions found here)

    (and now, what does that really mean?) My role is as a helping professional, and it is two-fold:

    • to help and support the teachers at two Adult Education centres as they integrate technology into their teaching practices in purposeful ways.
    • to help the centres refine their plans for purposeful integration of technology into their programs.

    Purposeful is key here. There is no sense integrating technology for the sake of flashing shiny new gadgets around a building. Those of you who have read some of what I have been writing for the past 6 years or so know that, though I use a lot of technology in my own teaching and reflective practice,

    One of the reasons I went in before my official first day of work (Monday) was that Avi Spector, the (yes, the. If I understood correctly, the English system has 1 regional RÉCIT consultant, the French system has 17 for the same region…) regional RÉCIT consultant for Adult Education was visiting and I had a wonderful 1/2 hour (ok, maybe it lasted closer to an hour?) scheduled to talk with him. My biggest takeaways from meeting with him were that

    • a) he loves what he does,
    • b) he is extremely helpful
    • and c) he shares my belief that pedagogy comes first. Techno bling is not worth much if doesn’t enhance good, solid pedagogy.

    I had a lot of fun meeting the people I will be working with for the next 4 months. I spent yesterday at one of the centres, I will visit the other centre on Wednesday. So far everyone I have met seems to love what they do, so that is already a bonus! How lucky am I that I get to work with a group of people who love what they do? Talk about inspiring.

  • Teaching in the dark

    Lately I have been teaching in the dark.

    Our school has no Internet access. The students have none at home, either.

    What do we do? We read. We have conversations, live conversations, about what we read. We look for solutions together and they are made from the stuff of our brains.

    Did I mention that we read? My students in Grades 7 through 11 love to read. All of them. And they can have and do have conversations about the books they read. They can even make connections between them. They jump up and down with pure joy about some of the books they are reading. I actually have to tell students to stop reading.

    I see the Science teacher outside, collecting insects with the students, examining them under microscopes and in their terrariums. I see evidence of writing in French when they students laboriously and lovingly work on their scrapbooks by hand and write letters describing why they included what they did.

    At lunch time students play with each other. Yes. Even the boys in Grade 11.

    Lately I have been teaching in the dark and I’m surprised to say it has been illuminating.

  • Trusting your teachers should trump tech savvy in administration

    Scott asks:

    Do administrators have to be technology-savvy themselves in order to be effective technology leaders in their organizations?

    I used to think yes, now I think not so much.

    What administrators need to be is trusting of their teachers. Technological change happens in the classroom. It won’t happen if it is dictated from above, it will happen if teachers are allowed to use what they see fit for their classroom, their students.

    Granted, administrators need to ok the purchase of expensive hardware but once that is in place so much can be done at the discretion of the teacher! If administrators have to know how to use each and every bit of technology, each and every app, before it is implemented in the classroom things will be slow.

    Trusting of your teachers. That is what administrators have to be.