Considering that I am 25 years of age, I suppose that I belong to the crop of teachers/professionals who are technology "savvy", and thus should have a deep and robust understanding of current and developing technologies that are relevant to the music classroom. While I would say that I do feel comfortable with many programs that are useful to the music educator (i.e. Sibelius, Audacity, etc.), I have never been completely comfortable with using social media tools and apps.
I teach in an area that rural and low population schools make up a significant portion of all school districts. Needless to say, these schools tend to be a bit less up to date on new technologies, let alone how to effectively use them. With this in mind, very few teachers seem to have the know how or the desire to interact via social media or other online service (even email is a struggle at times). However, what I found so helpful from the online Bauer reading is that PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) can supported by individuals 10 miles down the road or halfway around the world.
Being a fairly new teacher, I often wish that I could seek advice on issues that I encounter in my teaching. While the teachers here are happy to offer such advice, sometimes busy schedules make face to face meetings impossible, and thus I am given very little opportunity to communicate with them. However, through the use of PLNs I can find such advice from and through a variety of sources. For example, posting an issue on a blog, finding a podcast that covers a specific issue, or even just launching a request into the Twittersphere (or "verse" depending on your persuasion).
Even with all of these wonderful tools available, the one thing that still bothers me a bit is that this does not directly help to solve the issue of current teachers that do not make use of even basic technology. For example, in chapter one of the Bauer reading he details how many teachers point a lack of professional development in current technologies. While I certainly do not doubt that many professionals feel this way, it is nonetheless disheartening to see a teacher's personal webpage (usually supported by the districts home site) covering what musical concepts will be covered for the fall of 2010. I am interested to see what others may think is the best way to tackle this problem and others like it.
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ReplyDeleteIf you go through my schools web page and look into specific teachers’ pages, you’ll notice that far more of the experienced teachers have only done the basic information and have never updated. Compared to those of us with much less years’ experience, we have have updated our pages at least once a year if not every few months. I'm not sure how much of it has to do with the professional development (we get a refresher for the school web page editor in our e-mail 2 times a year) or simply because the more experienced teachers are the more likely it is that they are technology immigrants and see it as "this is one more thing on my plate I don't have time for” (and by the way, this is a direct quote from a teacher, who is retiring at the end of the year, during our last faculty meeting).
DeleteI honestly believe that the closer you are to being a technology native, the more likely it is that you'll want to incorporate it into your classroom. Growing up with it, knowing how to troubleshoot the issues, and using it every day in your personal life creates less of a barrier to using it in the classroom. Professional development will only take you so far when it comes to learning new things, I honestly feel that we need to do own research (weather it’s blogs, podcasts, Google search, etc…) to keep up with the ever changing times or we’ll be left behind and become less effective teachers.
Great Post, Very informative! ~Saralyn
We seem to be in very similar situations. I am also 25 and a new teacher in a small rural underprivileged school. I found myself thinking, "YES! Someone knows exactly how I feel!" as you described the issue of not always being able to bounce thoughts or troubleshoot problems off of others. Before reading the article, I never really thought about using social media as a tool for professional communications. After it was presented it was one of those aha moments.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that it is frustrating when teachers/co-workers are not using technology. Even something as elementary as email can become very frustrating when not answered promptly. I think as new teachers we should be actively encouraging those that may be hesitant about technology use to explore the different options they have and place their reservations aside in order to benefit the students and coworkers.
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