Even in the nearly 20 years I’ve been in my profession, technology has changed my job considerably. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that technology alters my job as much as it alters our everyday lives.
As a kid going to school from the late 70s into the early 90s, I grew up during the personal computer explosion. Schools, for better for worse tried to keep up.
Back in elementary school, I remember using the Commodore pet computers, with their one memory and cassette drives, writing, commands and playing games in basic.
In 12th grade, my English teacher gave us a writing assignment and insisted that we write it, printed on and stored on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. To this day, I specifically remember sitting in the computer lab when she told us that she believed the end of, pencils and paper was upon us. She missed the mark on that by a few decades; but A for effort!
While, I started on my local community college, I could remember a few of my age buddies talking about being required to submit one assignment per week through their university’s e-mail system.
I know I’m glossing over things quite a bit, but but then I remember getting dial up, Internet, high-speed, Internet, cellular phones, text messaging, smart phones… TikTok…
By the time I started teaching, taking attendance via computer was the norm. Intradistrict office email was the preferred form of communication from one teacher to another. There were still some old-school, holdovers, who insisted on keeping a paper record of everything. For me, while I’m happy to have hardcopies of assignments in my classroom, I cannot stand excessive paper clutter.
Without a doubt, the path-of-no-return game-changing moment for integrating technology in the classroom was covid lockdowns. As much as teachers were moving toward implementing , the lockdowns forced us all to go digital.
The strange thing is, I remember, while working in my last school district seeing a program available to us, called “Microsoft teams“ after all, my school district was a “Microsoft using district“ so when the lockdown took place, we are immediately thrust into using Microsoft teams to conduct our virtual classes.
The lockdowns forced us – and by “us” I mean not just teachers, but everybody – do you finally start implementing this technology that we had created years before. It is as if we had the resources at hand, but didn’t have any practical use for them until the lockdown.
Even today, lots of businesses are still slowly transitioning back into three day, office, two day work at home weeks. I have a handful of friends who are attorneys and love conducting court cases via zoom calls.
Thinking back on it now, I don’t know if I have been to five face-to-face in office doctors appointments in the last four years.
Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:
- Teacher Armor and the Saturday Clearing
- The Extra Day: A Ten-Year Memory
- Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
- Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)
- The Muscle of Empathy
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