IT’S A JUNGLE OUT HERE
\nRichard White
\n2013-03-14<\/p>\n
I’ve been wanting to write for a long time about the challenges that technology users face in some schools, in some rooms, in some educational cultures. It’s something that we all face on occasion, from a colleague who “doesn’t really do technology” to a school leader with an uninformed knee-jerk reaction to social networking, from infrastructure that is unable to support the increased hardware and bandwidth demands of a classroom to pure, simple, reluctance to change… being on the leading edge of technology-based education reform—and worse, being on the bleeding<\/em> edge—is not for the meek.<\/p>\n You can insert your favorite Don Quixote quote here if you like.<\/p>\n A little bit of a wildcat mentality may come in handy if you’re more gung-ho than your colleagues, administration, or school is currently willing to support… and dare I say it, a little bit of cash. When LCD projectors first dropped to the barely-sub-$1000 price range a few years ago, both I and a colleague of mine each bought one. It’s not that we had loads of cash lying around; it’s just that we were *that* committed to trying to transform the way we were doing things in the classroom.<\/p>\n If your school can’t buy you a computer that meets your needs, try to beg, borrow, or buy one that will.<\/p>\n If a decent backup strategy for your computer isn’t currently available to you, buy a service, or get an external hard drive, or learn how to roll your own backup strategy on a friend’s server.<\/p>\n If your kids don’t have “clicker”-style Classroom Response Systems, get a set of whiteboards and dry erase markers that they can use to record their responses for display to the instructor.<\/p>\n If your school blocks YouTube, use a video downloader plug-in like Flash Video Downloader to pull down the video locally onto your computer and show them from there.<\/p>\n The point is obviously that there are almost always options. We just need to be creative.<\/p>\n Will Richardson tells the story in one of his blog postings about the time he was giving a presentation at a school, and there was one teacher who kept road-blocking efforts to move forward technologically. “Yes, but that won’t work because…,” and then, “I tried to do that, but…” Finally tired of the negativity, Will stumbled upon a response that both acknowledged the man’s concerns and placed the responsibility for addressing those concerns squarely on his shoulders: “Yup, you’ve got some challenges there. So what are you going to do about that?”<\/p>\n “What are you going to do about that?”<\/p>\n It’s a jungle out here, and we’re all looking for ways to survive. It’s okay. We signed up for this. We can deal with it.<\/p>\n I stumbled upon this post a couple of days ago, which is a nice reminder of how we sometimes need to do things a little differently. It comes from the Business section of Wired Online, but I think it’s got a lot of relevance for educators as well.<\/p>\n Check it out: http:\/\/www.wired.com\/business\/2012\/06\/resiliency-risk-and-a-good-compass-how-to-survive-the-coming-chaos\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" IT’S A JUNGLE OUT HERE Richard White 2013-03-14 I’ve been wanting to write for a long time about the challenges that technology users face in some schools, in some rooms, in some educational cultures. It’s something that we all face on occasion, from a colleague who “doesn’t really do technology” to a school leader with … Continue reading It’s a Jungle Out Here<\/span>