Feb 27 2007
It’s Passing Me By
My school has some amazing technology.
When I first started working here 8 years ago I thought I was in heaven. Each classroom had 6 computers, my computer lab had 28 student computers and one teacher computer (we have had class size reduction from 28 to 25, but I now have 27 student computers and 2 teacher computers – one at the front of the room to teach from and one on my desk – that is an actually picture of part of my lab), we had school wide email (students even had email the first year) and I had the ability to make a class webpage (I even updated the whole school website at one point). Next year I’m getting a mimio to make my whiteboard interactive!
Today, however, I feel that technology is speeding past me. The computers in my lab are getting old. I’ve lost track of how old they are (I think 4 years) , but in the 8 years the school has been around, I’ve only had one update of new computers. (Well, really my 2 teacher computers are one year younger than the student computers). I wrote yesterday about wanting to use Google Earth and today the IT guys explained to me why it can’t happen; bandwidth, servers and video cards being the most prominent.
My school is actually getting some new computers this year – I think we skipped a year or two of updates in what was supposed to be a rolling update so that each classroom got new computers every 4 years (I think) and I really shouldn’t complain about my 4 year old computers. The computers that are being replaced are original to the school – 8 years! It can take 10 – 15 minutes for people to log onto those computers sometimes. Those original computers aren’t only in some classrooms, but they are in ALL teacher planning rooms. Rumor has it that the brand new computers are going into classrooms and the planning rooms will be getting 4 year old computers from the elementary school (which also got new computers for their classrooms).
OK, back to the point of this post. While my school has more technology than a lot of other schools, we’re not keeping up with the technology. Not that we don’t want to. The biggest obstacle is money.
We sometimes have enough trouble getting teachers to use technology in the classroom. Some are scared of it, some just don’t know how to use it well enough, some are constrained by the need to make sure our students do well on state tests and some just don’t want to be bothered to find new ways to teach, but there are those who would use it if they had equipment capable of handling the newest technology.
