Techlearning blog

I can imagine that to be a rollicking good time, negotiating with your peers to have the shoebox full of report cards in order that you could add your grades to the student record. This might mean that in the week between when grades closed and report cards were sent out, you had to wrangle not only the time during your school day to actually get the report cards in your hands, but also you needed to transfer your grades from your grade book to the individual sheets of paper for each student. From that point, I can only imagine that someone else had to take all the grades and input them into a program which would allow the information to be printed in a report card. You can imagine the rest, the report card would be printed, then sent out to the family. , time time.

Fast forward to a time where most of us have computers where we keep track of student daily grades and then a program we log into that keeps track of the grades, we add the grades when we have time to work on them without negotiating with others.

How about attendance at your school? Not too long ago many of us were taking attendance with attendance cards, or writing our attendance on a paper, waiting for yet another person to come around the building and collect the information. Then we were introduced to online attendance. While it may not have freed up the classroom teacher that much for more instructional time, it did allow for the data to be electronically stored and immediately used. The office secretary indeed did get many hours back in the day by having this type of electronic data input from all the teachers, rather than the one secretary adding all the data from all the teachers. Time, time, time.

Do you recall how these 2 transformations happened? I assume that 30 percent of us jumped at a chance to use the technology to give us more time to teach. I assume that the other 60 percent of us had to be told we had no choice. Still, there are 10 percent in denial that we need to enter data electronically.

What has all this provided us? This has provided us with an opportunity to make the information or the data, transparent? Parents and students no longer have to wait until progress time or end of the semester or trimester to learn about the status of the student's grades. We have the opportunity to make much more of our school work transparent.

For those of us who answer the TechLearning weekly polls, Between 38% and 72 % of us reported that Technology's Impact on our teaching has mostly been in the area of planning and instructional support. However between 0% and 12.9% of us report the technology has impacted student data and accountability. What I find most odd about this, is that in my school, as part of the NetDay Speak Up survey, the greatest percentage of my teachers reported that 90% regularly use email or IM peers or parents and 100% use an online Student Information System for reporting attendance and grades. However, 70% use online resources for classroom instruction or remix online resources for their specific classroom needs.

Is there a relationship between what technologies we use as educators and what is "mandated" that we use? If all of our staff were mandated to add information to our Student Information System then we show 100% use. Our parent groups and our school committee promoted electronic communication and we show that with 90% regular usage. With permissive use of technology in our lesson presentations we remain at 70%. Interesting that we found the time to learn how to email and add information to the Student Information Systems. Now we must find the to use more technology tools with our students. Schools have changed, schools are changing, it is time, time, time to stop saying that schools are living in the 20th Century. We have evidence that we have moved beyond.

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