I need to slow down.
I recently gave a presentation (the format was gleefully stolen from the superb Mike Meechin, check out his blog here) in which I showed our teaching staff about 60 technology tools to use in the classroom in 60 minutes. The night before, I had screencasted myself using the apps, either through a browser or grabbed from an iPad using Quicktime's screen recording function on my Mac, and inserted the videos into a Keynote. This allowed me to talk about each application and actively show it being used to the audience without them having to sit there and just think, "well, that SOUNDS good." It went very well and I received a lot of positive feedback. Fast forward to yesterday. Kathy Androski, our media specialist and a tech guru herself, had invited me to assist in leading training for our 6th grade team, as they are receiving iPads for themselves and their students next year (our only grade level currently without 1:1 devices). We had a simple agenda. Spend some time helping teachers log in to Google Drive, it's functions, the purpose of the app, and how it can store and receive data from other apps on the device. Before I knew it, I found myself talking about Google Docs scripts like Doctopus and Google Chrome extensions, Google's infrastructure, and also found myself looking at some confused faces. I did what I typically do--got excited about a particular app or tech tool, and started spewing out every thought that came into my head. Why am I writing about this? Because it reminds me of when someone asks me to show them something on a computer and I breeze through steps A, B, and C to get to their question (let's call it "D"). Steps A-C are important, and yet I leave them out. When I got my new Journalism I students this semester, I gave them an iMovie project and expected them out of habit to know how to trim video clips, separate audio tracks from video, and cut together a video news report, when most of them did not. It's important for me to always remember that while I know my way around plenty of Web 2.0 tools and iPad apps, not everyone has had a chance to experiment and figure out steps A-C yet. It's my job to show them. I mention this not to inflate my own ego or claim that I know more than others, but simply because I've been in situations that required explicit instruction and I never received it. It's easy for me, being surrounded by technology on a daily basis, to forget--but I need to remind myself to slow down. |
AuthorMiddle School English Teacher. Tech obsessed. Has devices. So do his students. They use them often. Archives
November 2017
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