The two realms of Ed Tech - part 2

full article here

Administrativia

Communication with parents, students and other teachers is easier and more efficient. Email, discussion boards, classroom webpages, google-groups, and even wiki’s allow teachers to effectively communicate with educational stakeholders. Teachers can easily create classroom notices, and classroom bulletins. A special note on archives. One of the great things about email is the ability to save and archive messages - allowing you to easily recall and organize conversations. Using instant messaging, teachers can easily communicate with other teachers in remote locations.

Grading. Teachers can more efficiently assess their students. Teachers can quickly print a page of missing work and assignments, or show the average grade without manual computing. Some systems allow educators to publish grades and missing assignments online. Teachers can save tests and quizzes. With click-response systems, teachers can immediately assess student understanding.

Planning. Teachers can create lesson plans easily, but they can also share them. They can use common word processing tools and calendaring tools. They can create and manage to-do lists. Teachers can easily use a shared calendar. They can work on projects using a product like bootcamp, from 37signals.

Organization. Using folders and tags teachers can arrange and organize their data, making data retrieval more efficient and effective. In tandem with planning, teachers can search for files with similar keywords in the body of the file.

In summary, there are many ways technology can make a teacher’s life more efficient.

Supporting the administrativia needs of teacher involve:

1) Timely technical support: usually support should be proffered within 24 to 48 hours of a request
2) Effective technical support*
3) Providing a computer for each teacher: with common and consistent version of office tools
4) Available and accessible howto-type training
5) Ensuring access to networked resources, such as printers, shared filespace
6) Of course, adequate bandwidth (internally and externally).

* Many schools rely on a librarian or other classroom teacher to support and organize their technology. For simple issues, and simple organizations, this system probably works, but for sophisticated systems, this doesn’t usually work.