Digital Frustration
As a teacher I admit to loving most things digital. I see digital tools as an enganging way to get and hold students attention, and the fact they relate to them so well makes teaching and learning very natural. As I am often the cheerleader for technology I also get to listen to fellow teachers express their digital frustrations.
Just recently some teachers were informed that they would not be able to change grades or drop students, by way of the IT department locking out their computer grading program. Without getting into grading policy and all those things better left to school boards, my concern was the distrust in technology that resulted from the move. In one move the computer changed from being a tool to help teachers record and average grades to a teacher monitoring device. I bet you can guess what the teacher’s reactions were!
Teachers all over the place are experiencing digital frustrations of their own. As Bill Ferriter reported in his blog, “Teachers are frustrated when, district firewalls are blocking every service that they want to use, their tech contacts are no where to be found, and their access to critical resources is insufficient to meet the demands of their digital efforts. ” It is easy to see teachers could become discouraged and the promising uses of technology will remain unexplored because of well intentioned oversight.
In the case of our first example a teachers grade book, spiral bound and carried loving between home and school was almost a personal extention of oneself. If an adminstrator asked to see a grade book you located it, copied the page , and the book was still your own. With a networked computerized grade book program-the grade book becomes the districts, to change and modify as they please.
Firewalls and district access policies are real—and they pose challenges for teachers who are working with digital tools for the first time. There is nothing worse than investing hours into the perfect lesson only to have those tools blocked when you are half way through the lesson plans.
Too often schools IT departments are run by IT professionals with no classroom experience so their perspective is somewaht different from an educators. To many of them -using PowerPoint is just the same as using Animoto. Just as often we educators do not realize the security and virus concerns the IT department is protecting district resources against.
One thing I do know is that if technology is going to be able to affect student achievement we need to have better working relationships with IT departments! When you look at the success the UK has had in integrating ICT across the curriculumn the major factor seems to be an overall tech friendly policy implemented from the top down. In the case of the Uk they have not blocked sites-instead they have created many wonderful interactive tools to support curriculumn.
