Just Another Day in the Life of a Teacher with Technology

I wasn’t born a computer geek, but I’ve been working my way up to it for a long, long time. I took a programming class in high school, got a programmable calculator as a graduation present, took a few computer science courses in college, and wrote my first web page as a requirement for my Master’s in education. (“What a waste THIS is,” I thought at the time.)

A few years later, and this is what my day looks like. This is what TODAY looked like.

The cellphone goes off at 6am. It’s my alarm now, with its own built-in snooze function. I reach for it, blink my eyes open, and squint a little as I check my email and slowly come awake. The cron job running backups on my server in Texas worked just fine, according to the automatic email that was sent at 1 am. The “problem-a-day” email from my AP Physics website was automatically sent out just fine, I see. It’s there, alongside a U.S. History problem-a-day from my colleague, Greg Feldmeth.

I get to school and head into the first class of the day. We spend part of the period watching a DVD lesson on Newton’s Laws (running off my laptop), and the rest of time going over a review worksheet (originally developed in Word by my colleague, and shared via email with her colleagues.)

My second class for the day, we’re finishing up a unit. I run a PowerPoint presentation from the laptop, and make an announcement to the students that if they’re still feeling a little lost, they can:

1. download the lecture slides from the class website,
2. view an online screencast of the slides, with me narrating, and
3. download a PDF of the practice test that they can use to prepare for the upcoming exam.

At the end of class, I attempt to show students a web-only comic strip relevant to our study, but am unable to connect to the wireless network. Even computer geeks run into problems sometimes.

In between classes, I sit down in my office, launch Firefox on the laptop, and log into the web application that stores my students’ grades. A few seconds from now, they and their parents will be able to log into that same server to confirm progress in the course, identify areas of concern, and contact the instructor with questions.

Then, I’ve got a physics lab to run. The students have identified the lab from the online course schedule, downloaded the lab protocol from the course website, and come into class with their written pre-lab already prepared. Five minutes prior to the start of the lab, it occurs to me that students might be more easily able to measure the angles in the lab using an “electronic level,” which I’d heard one could download for the iPhone. I confirm that the application exists, announce that the iPhone application can be downloaded for free, and watch as six students whip out their own phones and download the app. Twenty minutes later those six phones (and my own) are being shared around the lab as students collect inclined plane data for calculating coefficients of static friction.

After lab I check in via AIM chat with a colleague at the school, and we briefly discuss the meeting schedule for later that day. Shortly afterwards, we text each other on our cellphone to make arrangements for a quick afternoon coffee.

That afternoon I attend a meeting of the educational technology committee. During that get-together I demonstrate Google’s new Wave application, add information to a spreadsheet stored “in the cloud” (on Google’s servers), and share that spreadsheet with the eight other people in the room so that they can examine and edit it later on. After the meeting has ended, I sit down to demonstrate to Greg how I’ve been using Twitter to invite students and teachers to sign up for my problem-a-day website. Within minutes, by way of response, three new people have subscribed to my website, and Greg rushes off to try the same thing using his Twitter account.

This evening, my students will be able to check their homework with the solutions that have been posted online. “Just in time” fact-checking allows them to make corrections to their own work without having to wait to ask me in class tomorrow, or worse, to make time in their already busy schedules to meet with me.

This is how we do things now. We have cellphones, and Internet access, and websites, and communication, and we can leverage those tools to improve what we do, which in turn allows us to focus on the things in our jobs and our lives that are most important.

Transitions to new ways of doing things can be challenging, and may initially given the appearance of requiring more work from teachers’ schedules that are already overfilled. The secret is that appropriate technology actually reduces a teacher’s workload. An instructor who posts lecture notes online where students can view/download them reduces the tedious copying down of text during class time, allowing students and teacher to spend more time focusing on actually working with and understanding the material. Entering and posting students’ grades online reduces both student anxiety and the number of phone calls that an instructor fields from concerned parents. The electronic archive of course documents–class handouts and tests in Word, lecture/discussion presentation in PowerPoint, classroom calendars in Excel, etc.–allow a teacher to steadily build a collection of resources for teaching, minimize duplication of effort from year to year, and make a great resource that can be shared with colleagues.

Lifelong-learning for teachers, including various forms of professional growth and staff development, now involves a technology component. No one at the administrative level set it up that way or made it a new requirement–it just happened. Appropriate use of technology is becoming, and should become, an integral part of our teaching.

How you choose to make that happen is, at least in part, up to you. There is no single path. But we’re all making our way, and all heading more-or-less in the same direction down this road. Technology is transforming both our ability to teach, and the ways we teach.

It’s an exciting time to be an educator!