My Brain Hurts

The lure of blogging has been calling for some time but the abilty to answer it has been a somewhat rocky road. Having had two blogspot blogs go west at blogger and not been able to resolve the problem I decided to up anchor and give edublogs a go. All was well for the first month and I really liked the way the blog can be customised to suit the look you want. However then the same problem I had with Blogger followed me here – suddenly my password and username were not recognised even though they were being entered correctly. Throw in some time off for a holiday and I was off cyber air for about a month. Upon my return, no amount of fiddling seemed to work so it was time to seek some technical assistance.

Unlike my Blogger experience I requested a new password which still didn’t work but it appeared to actually come from a person rather than from an automated response system so I wrote to that person detailing my tail of woe. The next day there was a reply email with new login details that again appeared to be from a real person. OK, things are looking hopeful. Tentatively the new details were entered into the login page and holding my breathe, the magic go button was pressed. Nothing much happened straight away, but then that is a good thing – no error message. Then the page loaded and voila my blog was back.

I am so impressed that a site that now hosts 100 000 blogs was able to give human attention to my problem. Well done edublogs and mant happy returns. I’m looking forward to getting back into the blogging seat.

These words were uttered to me today by a friend who only uses PCs. For a long time I have used both a Mac and a PC, nowdays its an Intel Macbook that runs both so at least I only need one computer. I really wouldn’t like to be without both as each has its own advantages, but if I had to make a choice the wonderful creativeness of the Mac and it’s associated software wins hands down. But this is not about me.

My friend’s statement referred to his wife who also has a PC only background but was issued with a Mac by her school earlier this year. He stated that “She had put it in the cupboard and left it there, having only used it about twice. So much for the user friendliness of the Mac”.

The Mac vs PC thing is really boring so let’s not go there as this is not about that.

The real issue here however is an all to familiar one in education. Lots of money spent on the technology and precious little on staff training.

I know that she has had bugger all PD on how to use her new Mac. Teachers are incredibly busy so unless they have a real techno drive they are not going to invest the necessary time required to learn something new. A person can not become an instant expert on a new machine after only limited exposure.

Has she been shown the basics of using it? Has she been shown the way it uses Word, Powerpoint, Excel and the Internet exactly the same way her PC does? Has she been shown the highly creative iLife suite of programs preloaded on it? Has anyone shown her how simple it is to create and publish really high quality podcasts with GarageBand? Widgets anyone? Or how easily a class lesson can come alive using Comic Life? The inbuilt camera, ichat, webcams or downloading podcasts and organising audio and video content via iTunes? How to download a file from uTube to use in class, converting video formats with iSquint? Has she been exposed to the wonders of Google Earth? How easily files can be dragged and dropped into other applications or the wonderful level of interactivity between various programs? What about the use of virtual worlds? etc, etc, etc

I doubt that she has been made aware of any of this.

In reality she has been given a Ferrari and all she has been shown how to do is to put on the parking brake. Given the above situation I’d probably put it in the cupboard as well.

It’s been stated by many people many times over that for every $ spent on technology a $ needs to be spent on training. Some schools and districts have wonderfully supportive PD networks, but some others . . . . . .