For the first time since I've started my career as a Technology Director, I've been requested to work on a Saturday. After nearly 3 years of working the same schedule and having all of my weekends off, Saturday has become almost like a religious holiday for me..I was almost stupified when they asked me to work this one. It's a teacher inservice day, a make-up from one lost to a snow storm. No, I'm not a teacher, so why do I have to go? Well, let me answer that for you. The staff of the Elementary school decided to nominate Technology as their topic for professional development. So, in essence..they nominated me to facilitate the workshops for them. At first I paniced a little, I had no clue what I would talk about. I decided that digital citizenship would be an excellent topic so I got to work putting together a nice presentation on it. A few days later, I was working on our Student Information System..and a teacher came in and literally asked me if I could copy and paste something for her. I was kinda stunned that they didn't know how, but I'm accomodating and decided that even though I couldn't leave the work I was doing, I would write down instructions for them. I wrote the instructions and then sent them on their way. Not even 10 minutes later, they came back in. In the instructions I wrote "Open Microsoft Word". They were stuck there. They didn't know how to open Microsoft Word. I realized right then that we had a huge problem. Today I spent a few hours putting together a detailed and easy to follow presentation covering computer basics. Included were things like "this is a megabyte" all the way up to file management. When I see these teachers struggling with what I consider simple tasks, I sometimes have a hard time believing what I'm seeing. Let me tell you though, after putting this presentation together, I got to look at things froma different point of view. I can easily see now that if no one had ever stopped to show these folks anything, and if they didn't spend a lot of time geeking out, as I do...that these tasks that we computer nerds find so menial..could actually be difficult for those who are "old-school" as they say. I hope my presentation helps.
From now on, I'm going to try to get my blog posts done earlier in the day, this way I'm not half asleep while writing them. Sorry for the hurried posts, gotta get my message out before my face hits the keyboard and I start snoring.
Good night all.
Photo Courtesy: Amazon
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