Well I've been teaching for two years now and I've experienced a lot of change in s short amount of time.
First, my school went digital. What does this mean? Well every student for an iPad and teachers received no training on how to use ipads efficiently in the classroom. Students were suppose to be restricted to a "school app store" but very quickly found methods to get around that and download anything they wanted to. As a school, we had a very lose digital contact that administration did not enforce and that our tech department did not implement well. It was very rough and hopefully the experience will be better next year.
My personal thoughts on the transition are that ipads are replacing the notebook and saving the school money on printing. They are a replacement, not an engagement. The cost of entry for them and the cost of the networking upgrades are probably way more than the printing costs so I would be interested to see the longterm return on them.
The school needs to have a logical plan for when students break the rules on the ipad. It needs to be followed by everyone. One of the big issues currently is if a teacher takes the device, the student maybe unable to do work on their next class.
Our school also got a learning management system (LMS) called schoology. It is actually s pretty good platform but the school is not training us effectively on it and is demanding that we learn how to use it on our own time so they don't have to pay us. That is crooked and unfair in my opinion. Other than that, I like the tool very much.
So very briefly, that is what has been going on. I'm very scared at how education as a whole is being treated like a business and less like a place of learning. There seem to be more and more administration and people of power who make demands with no realistic understanding of what it's like to be in a classroom trying to teach 36 kids with different learning abilities.
I will try to add more to this blog this summer and will hopefully start my masters in a little over a year.
