Thanksgiving Assignment - Caroline Kreul

Over Thanksgiving break, I spoke to my mother about her experience with technology. Being a high school teacher, she said that the most difficult technological change she has encountered in her classroom thus far in her career was the general introduction of the internet. She said that the change happened maybe ten years ago. My mother has never been particularly tech savvy and she said that, what felt like overnight, she was expected to have all of her students' grades, worksheets, and review questions posted online. She said that she had a really hard time because she had to take the time to scan in all of these worksheets and review questions that she previously had in paper form to make copies with into the system. She said she spent a couple hours after school a few times a week for a few months to get everything organized online (remember here that she is the opposite of tech-savvy). On top of uploading grades and these worksheets, she says that what really has taken time out of her day is the plethora of workshops that teachers were and still are expected to attend on a monthly basis. Rather than getting teachers' input on how they would prefer to run their classrooms, she says that at these meetings, they are basically told what they have to do (ie. using the online world) regardless of how comfortable they are with the changes.