Technology is scary. By its very definition it is new, and as much as we hate to admit it, new scares us. It’s funny, but teachers are often the worst learners. We get comfortable. We know what works, and we can’t always see the advantage of trying something new. If it is new, then there are infinite ways that it can go ALL wrong.
This year, I pushed myself to add more technology into my classroom, and honestly, it didn’t always go well. I leaned on our librarian, Chad Heck. Google and I became best buds. But for all of the hiccups, there were also successes. I allowed myself to be inspired and run with it. That big project we are going to start tomorrow? Let’s try it with Adobe Spark instead of PowerPoint. Did I even know how to use Adobe Spark? Nope. But Chad said he thought it would be a cool tool for presentations, so let’s do it. My honest answer to students questions was “I don’t know.” Did I have to change my expectations and tweak the rubric as we went? Totally. But because I couldn’t help my students as much as I normally could (would) with even the basics of the program, it forced them to be better problem solvers, and the final product was light years better than previous years. I was ecstatic, and I had more student participation than ever. I call that a win. I am not going to lie to you. You will be frustrated. You will be tempted to throw your laptop out of a second floor window. But you won’t. How can we expect our students to push past their frustrations if we won’t push past our own? You know that the greatest learning comes out of a failure, so try something new. Learn from what went wrong, and keep going. What is the worst thing that could happen? Today's thoughts come to us from Liz Wittich. Liz teachers Freshman English at Pike High School with 19 years of experience. When she isn't teaching, you can find her with a crochet needle in her hand and retired grey hound at her side.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
April 2018
Categories |