Well I suppose that all educational experience is not something that should be taken for granted, and that even we technical people run into things that just mystify us as to their workings.
I believe that this weekend with the Podcast, and also my systems at work (curse them and their hardware failover) falls into this catagory of problems. The Dreaded "Technical Difficulties.
However, what happens when we are not technically saavy educators and things dont continue to work for us? Is there help available from the school or organization to talk us through or even better...educate us on how this all works?
This lack of training and instruction is something that we in the educational arena are quick to criticize the business arena for, but fall victim to ourselves. We are dependent on the technology, but often leave it to the user to figure out due to bad planning or small budgets.
I believe that we need to take a critical look at this, and look at technology skills, be it Microsoft Word Shortcuts or embedded podcasts, as no different that basic needed skills. Otherwise we will continue to fall short in our goal to integrate technology into the classroom.
thanks for reading, I'm going to go work on this podcast as soon as my 11 year old son shows me how to work the DVR."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Russ, I so agree with the technical support, or lack thereof, by the schools and administration. How do we go about changing this mode? It is said when we are trying to incorporate technology into our classrooms and the students can do it so much better than we can. I encourage my students to "beat me" in the technology department and show the rest of class new or great features of their computers. I have learned quite a bit from them, too.
Hi, Russ -
I completely agree that the lack of technical support in both education and industry fall very short, in most cases. We just had a faculty meeting yesterday with a director of one of the 'we'll help you use technology' areas of our University. However, the help is 62 miles away (as we are the branch campus). The only people we have on our campus to assist with educational technologies are the 'techies' (and I mean nothing derogatory by that term -- I used to be one!). The 'technies', though proficient in the software/hardware itself, have no clue about how to integrate the technology pedagogically.
So, how do we fix this? I have no idea...unfortunately, I don't control the budget!
Hope your son got that DVR figured out for you! ;)
Thanks for letting me vent a little!
Lisa
Post a Comment