The Teacher and The Technology Coordinator

Callie is a technology coordinator for the district; Callie has helped us with some of the technology we are trying to use in the classroom.  This morning it dawned on me that Callie is not and has never been a teacher. 

The web-based school interface Edison is trying to use is called edmodo.  It's fairly user friendly.  I've been asking my students to use it to submit final work (writing assignments), mostly because it streamlines the process.  (I am continually amazed by how much time I waste simply sorting through papers.)  It also has this nice feature where you can annotate a document using edmodo, which, again, streamlines the whole process of commenting on and handing back student work.

The catch is: students have to know how to export their files as a .pdf in order for me to annotate on their document.

So I mentioned this to Callie this morning; she stopped by just to check in and see how the kids were doing with the computers and with edmodo.  And I said: "fine."  She mentions the whole annotation thing to me (she has this tendency to point out things to me that I already know about), and I said it was a great feature.  I mentioned the whole export to .pdf thing to her, and she said: "all they have to do is export it as a .pdf".  At which point I remember Benjamin, who can barely type, and how it took him almost half of the period on Thursday to type and save a six line poem.  And the image of him (his scrawny little arms popping out of his bright red muscle shirt) struck me as sort of funny, so I smiled and responded: "Well, that's another step altogether."

And then she said, a little incredulously: "It's easy.  Just make a screen cast video and put it up on edmodo."

I caught myself getting defensive.  What she was proposing would be easy for my most technologically skilled students (and certainly for a technology coordinator), but for many of my students that process (exporting a file as another format) was beyond their developmental reach.  Callie didn't seem to understand that.  She seemed to think that all that was required in order to teach students like Benjamin how to do it was to throw a video up on the web.

And, I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work that way for many of my students.  I'm not letting myself off the hook yet for not teaching them how to do it, but for now I will content if they can save their files and upload to our class web page. 

Besides, the point of this is to write poems.