So far it has been a blast….
Amy’s “Things Have to Work” post is right on target.She says
the verge of breakdowns because the infrastructure is not up to par. So
consider yourself lucky if you have up-to-date technology that works
ALL THE TIME. The one way to lose momentum with teachers and kill a
program is to have slow internet access and different versions of
Microsoft Office on every computer.
I’m living that
scenario this year with my blog projects at the high school. The
computers are slow. The laptop carts seldom work. Labs are not readily
available for students. Now this is a progressive high school that has
technology in place but keeping it updated and working seamlessly is a
real problem. You have one instructional technology specialist who is
overworked and spread so thin that it is unbelievable. Yet she says, “So far it has been a blast.”
She sees the potential. She is making blogging a priority. My hat
is off to her and I am in for the long haul. We will persevere.
But yes, there are many days that I too feel like shouting from the
rooftops! So, when I said “Being literate requires
being part of the network.” That
was a quote that I have read so many times that I did not know who to
give credit to for saying it first but we need to add that
the network needs to work and work well!.
Thanks Amy for your post. It is most important!
November 13th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
Hey Anne,
Have been enjoying your posts recently… wondered also if youve had time to take a twirl past learnerblogs.org yet?
Cheers, James
November 13th, 2005 at 11:41 pm
Internet reliability is a pain and not limited to the US. In Scotland we have the network down in some Local Authorities every other day. How can we work like that? The “laptop carts” (we call them classroom in a box) are great but have no wireless connection in the school where I used to work and there are too few of the laptops to make forward planning with them feasible. As Scotland spends 37.5 million pounds (50 million dollars) on a national high-speed intranet/internet interconnect in the form of the Scottish Schools Digital Network (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ssdn), for which I am working on a content pilot for ML teachers (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/mfle) I wonder just how much Local Authorities are planning locally to make it a success in their schools.
My argument is that the kids have so much technology at their disposal at home and in their pockets we should be making more use of that through blogging and classroom wikis (and potentially home podcasting as part of a class podcast project). Overnight we can double/triple our hardware capacity in schools. Just a thought…