I have to admit my project this week brought extreme disappointment to me as I went around my school looking for teachers to help me out with what I wanted to accomplish.
I set out wanting to have just five teachers fill out the rubrics for me about an app they use in the classroom to enhance student learning. Sounds pretty easy right? There are over 30 teachers in my building. Two traveling sets of 33 iPads as well as some rooms that have permanent sets like the resource rooms as well as mine.
Well I went to school on Monday and I immediately looked into who had checked out the traveling iPads before and I sent all of those people emails asking if they would be willing to take less than ten minutes to fill out a rubric about an app they use.
I had three people say they would! Great, I only had to find two more. Instead of just leaving it to the email, I wanted to get out in the school and talk to people about what they were doing with the iPads. This is where I became extremely disappointed.
I talked to probably 5 teachers who had checked out the iPads and all of them used them to practice math problems or do research online. Not teach new concepts using the thousands of apps out there in almost all subjects. They were using it for the same thing over and over again (things, I might add, that don't NEED to be done on the iPads).
To further add to my disappointment, besides these maybe 10 people I had talked to, nobody else had even checked out the iPads this WHOLE year.
We are completely wasting our opportunities to use these resources!
I want to scream from the rooftop- YOU'RE MISSING OUT!
I talked with my technology teacher about this and she agrees, we could be doing so much more. I am hoping that next year I can possibly be on our technology committee and help my principal brainstorm ways to get our teachers more involved.
This class has taught me so much about how to use technology in education and it drives me crazy to see my school waste such an opportunity simply because most teachers are probably too afraid to take the leap!
So in the end I only got those three teachers to fill out the rubric and I filled one out myself as well. I will continue to use rubrics to evaluate apps in the future as I select more apps to use in my classroom.
Becky,
ReplyDeleteSounds like a frustrating experience. I run into this issue at my school as well. We do not have Ipads but we do have a computer available to reserve. I find myself unable to utilize this resource because it is reserved often by a math teacher for students to practice on the computer. It is quite frustrating. It may take some time to get all on board. Keep working at it!
Becky,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your experience with us. When we are excited about something and fully understand the impact it can have, it can definitely be frustrated to see if fall by the wayside. One of the things I have realized is that without an opportunity to understand how things work, some teachers are without time or the understanding to even begin implementing them into their day to day lessons. Our technology teacher at our school is something of a wonder. Last year we began shifting everything to Google. Sounds easy, but boy did it have some people upset. Our tech teacher took time out of her schedule (unpaid I might add) and set up after school classes and classes over the summer for teachers to share how to best utilize some of the new tools we had acquired. Our librarian, who is also part of our tech team, offers speed 5-10 minute sessions after lunch each day for teachers to learn something new on the iPads. Training is a must. If teachers are expected to use these tools, they need to be taught how to use them. Even as a digital native, I can imagine how intimidating it could be to be given a tool without any background knowledge. It sounds like you would like to get the ball rolling with that next year. I wish you the best of luck!