November 4, 2008

Well, it’s Election Day and about the farthest notion from my mind is who will be our next president. I’m busy at the moment observing my colleagues during a half-day workshop. We are learning about a new web portal that our school system has adopted, but unlike most forays into new technology this process is not typical.

Typically, new technology is met with some nervousness, questions like what’s wrong with the old program, who is going to train us, and so forth. There is, inevitably, a healthy dash of confusion as we all wrangle with the ins and outs of a new program over a span of a few weeks or months. We’ve adopted in recent years new programs to assist with tracking grades, record keeping, and having a personal website. Some teachers are more adept than others with these technologies, but in each case the hurdle is not the program we need to learn but rather our lack of experience with them –their newness.

What’s atypical about today’s process is that the latest technology -and not its novelty- is the hurdle. As I scan the room, my colleagues’ frustrations are palpable as anguished sighing grows in volume, requests for personal attention climb and huffing has replaced murmured negative comments. It doesn’t help that the computers are also “slow today” making progress too deliberate.

To make the situation laughable, the new web portal we’re working with is designed for businesses, not educators. The phrase sticking a square peg into a round hole fits perfectly here (ba-da-boom!). This one-stop, fits-all program is wonderful I presume if you are running a big business with a department dedicated to using it. I again presume that most employees in such a company are not actually expected to establish their sites but rather are given a functioning site which they can ask someone in the technology department to modify to suit. We cannot expect that level of support here as good as our technology people may be. But hey, we’re educators surely we can figure this stuff out?

10 minutes later and another quick scan of the workshop suggests otherwise:
Is my computer the only one going slowly?

Wait, why isn’t this working now?

I need help!

OK, I did it. It works! Just don’t ask me how I did it.

Ugh!
(You get the idea.)

I’m no less guilty and I consider myself above average with the tech stuff. Still, today is my third workshop with the web portal and it’s not getting much better for me. I wanted to use my part of the portal to establish a web forum for parents and colleagues and a spot to read my blog. The former was a success, though I needed a tech support person to make it function properly. The later looked good until I realized it wasn't functioning properly and was quite poor when compared to many of the free blog spots on the Internet. This is why I’m posting this blog, not through our new web portal, but through other means.

This is the weakness in education at times. We are not a business and it is not easy finding programs that are a genuine fit, but it doesn’t stop such programs from being adopted and implemented. The school year is amazingly busy and reviewing giant web applications is therefore difficult.

Just the same as I listen to three of my colleagues complain (quite loudly) what a waste of time this was I can't help but think: If only we, the teachers using the technology, had been included in the review process we might have used an appropriate program to learn something new today. It will come together in the end if for no other reason than it has to.