Emails to David 3: Digital Tools and This Teacher

Dear David:

I have a great deal of hard copy resources, in my veteran teacher cupboards, and a great deal of resources stored digitally, mostly in bookmarks and in digital copies of hard copy material. [All photos . . . come from a few keystrokes with Google. So . . . they are NOT my office.]

About 12 years ago, my internet access sped up at the school then employing me. And suddenly, I could access so much stuff of use to me as I prepared classes or just to enhance my scholarship. So I did access it. And I saved stuff digitally, but mostly I printed the material and put the material in 3-ring binders.

Very quickly, I found myself overwhelmed and, frankly, anxious about how much stuff there is "that I must read!"

I quickly noted that the Law of Diminishing Returns had kicked in and I hadn't really noticed. In other words, I had been teaching my classes well, introducing good stuff, changing the curriculum formally and ad hoc, etc. And I had been doing this partially because I had kept orderly . . . cupboards, cupboards which I culled nearly every summer.

I note that a cupboard can only hold so much stuff. The area may not be an ideal space for storing material in that it may be too big or too small. The space was given me and arbitrarily so. But the space is limited and so it does compel me to revisit and reassess material.


Digitally storing? The Cloud is nearly infinite and so I fear I could become more acquisitive and, thus, less discriminating and less thoughtful. I hoard as if hoarding alone increases my scholarship. Moreover, I spend more time with my face in my laptop. Sure, a book is just another technology to convey symbols, but my cupboards and shelves and my library and my desk and my reading chair and my bedstand and my favorite cafe and my dining table and my sofa require somehow more human interactions with material. But this may not seem sensible to 14 year old.

And, I know, it's the human who makes a book or a bedstand human. I'll humanize whatever tech you throw at me. In the future, some child might say, "You could only carry one book at a time and they could be kinda' heavy?!!? It's inhuman!"

The future beckons and it's not beckoning on paper.

g

Emails to David 2: Teaching and the Digital Literacy

David is our new and quite excellent Director of Educational Technology. Igor is the king of all hardware and software. I am the old teacher who recognizes that digital literacy may be harder for me . . . . This is the second of three letters.

Dear David:

I have found that one of my more difficult dilemmas in planning curriculum is how to choose from everything I might choose from. How do I create a reader in Econ from the enormous amount of reading I've done? How do I narrow it down? Even with good criteria, I'm left with too much and I have to cull and cull again. Same thing happens in any history class, less so in English, but there, too. And, of course, my reading generates not just reading assignment ideas, but project ideas and different ideas for Greg-centric or Student-centric lesson plans.

And this is just a matter of trying to choose among things I've read with a smattering of movies, videoes, podcasts thrown in.

How much more difficult will it be then, i.e., how much more time consuming will planning be if I add the capabilities and resources made available by digital tools? The prospect is a bit overwhelming! And that's just the prospect!

Now, it will seem less overwhelming to those for whom digital tools do not present other media, alternative media, i.e., people for whom digital tools exist seamlessly with . . . books and periodicals. It will seem less overwhelming to those for whom the technical proficiency already exists or at least the intuition exists which is necessary to develop the proficiency soon. So for someone like me, I really do have to make adjustments while the plane is flying.

Fortunately, the plane is not going down. No emergency here. But the plane IS going, as I see it, smoothly. I am certainly willing to risk some turbulence. And it may very be that kids in the near future will regard my classroom as a plane that can't get off the ground due to some old fashioned pedagogy if I don't learn to use the tech. Nonetheless, I do fear that I won't develop the intuition and that proficiency will always be beyond my grasp as new iterations of the digital tools keep racing to market. And I'm concerned about being even more overwhelmed by choices.

What Is This Blog All About? And What It's Not.

Musings, concerns, anecdotes of a 56-year-old teacher living in the SF Bay Area. This is NOT an anti-tech, Luddite rant. The Digital Revolution is here. I'm just awkward in welcoming it. Photo above: From Robert Frank's "The Americans."

Future of Books: Watch This One-Year-Old

Here is a video of a one-year-old who can't get a magazine to react to her touch the way an iPad does.

What does this portend?  It's obvious to me.  And I don't mind it.  Books will become ornaments, but too limited to actually "read" . . . because the reading, as the term is already understood, will be limited and physically clumsy.

I'm going to fly to Europe this summer and while I've always so looked forward to taking those two or three books with me -- not only because of my choice of authors, but also because of the physicality, the tactile sensation of "settling in" with a book --  I will, nonethless, on this trip take an iPad with a those two or three books, and the New Yorker, and a film or two, in it. 

And just in case there are tech glitches, I'll take a book, real book, with me.  And I'll find out where in Paris I can buy English language books.  Just in case mind you.