I Love Email !

One of the class reading assignments this week is a thought provoking article entitled "Toolishness is Foolishness". The article has resonated with those who have worked in the education system. But there is one item of technology that my district has adopted that has really made my work more efficient. That is email.

When I started at the school where I work as a media specialist, 10 years ago as a media assistant. At the time only a select few at the administration level had e mail. We also did not have room to room intercoms either, so if the library staff needed to contact a teacher, we either had to walk to the room and interrupt their class or leave a handwritten message in their teacher mailbox. That involved another walk across campus to the teacher lounge.

Somewhere around the 2001-2002 school year everyone got an email account. How wonderful....Now an e mail could be sent instead of walking all over campus. Many of the teachers use email to schedule library time.

I chuckled at Prensky's comment that you are probably a digital immigrant if you call someone to make sure they received the email you sent. With the receipt feature on our accounts, I don't resort to that tactic very often with highly important emails. However, I have learned who on the faculty never check their emails or don't use it. Our financial secretary told me flat out one time that she never responds to emails and if we need something we have to speak to her face to face.

Even with these few quirks...and the volume of funny forwards many feel compelled to fill my inbox with I find that my email makes my work flow much more efficient.

The Sesame Street Generation

Last year I was chatting with one of our science teachers as he was checking out a stack of videos and DVDs. I think he thought I might be raising an eyebrow at the number of such items he had been checking out over the past few weeks, and felt he needed to explain to me what he was doing. As I make it a practice not to question what a teacher is checking out there was no need, but it did lead to an interesting conversation. Over the past weeks he had been systematically working his way through our collection of science videos and DVDs, previewing for use with his ninth grade classes. He told that most of the kids had very short attention spans and unless he presented material in a rapidly changing sequence a la Sesame Street he could not keep them interested for the 90 minute class period which lead to discipline problems. We had a nice conversation about how students of today seem to have more trouble with anything that requires contemplation and how they have to have a constant bombardment of changing formats and information to hold their attention. He wondered how much this was the influence of TV and shows like Sesame Street. I haven't had as much of an opportunity this school year to talk with him, but wonder if his classes are different this time around. You see about mid-way through the year a Smartboard was installed in his classroom and he was trained on it. I know that he is an enthusiastic proponent of the use of Smartboard in the classroom. He may have found an answer to the problem of teaching the Sesame Street generation.

DVD or CD?

Yesterday, I wrote about people, both adult and student , who seem to have bad karma when it comes to technology. I would like to continue in the same vein.

This is not to make fun of or belittle anyone. But hopefully to remind us all as librarians that the people we deal with on a day to day basis come to the library with wildly different technology skills. We can either approach them with an attitude that makes them feel stupid or practice the Golden Rule. Helping someone deal with a techno problem in a sensitive way can go a long way in fostering a positive image of librarians and libraries.

So here is my story of the teacher and the CD. Or was it the DVD? As many of you probably know school libraries, or to use the PC term-media centers, are responsible for most of the audio visual equipment in a school. We also need to be experts (at least in the eyes of the students and staff) in operating, trouble shooting, and repairing this equipment.

At the beginning of the school year, one of the math teachers asked to borrow a CD player since they had received an instructional CD as part of their curriculum. So one was sent off to their classroom only to be returned in a day or two with a note saying the player wasn't working. A second one was sent out only to be returned because the teacher said it wasn't working either. Yet a third player was sent only to return.

The two of us that make up the library staff was quickly becoming concerned and not a little bit dubious. Did we have an epidemic of broken CD players? Was the teacher technologically challenged? Or could there be a problem with the outlets in that particular classroom? With a school as old as ours that is a distinct possibility. After a lengthy conversation with the teacher, we finally asked if it was possible the disk in question could be a DVD. Now I am sure the more astute among you have already considered this possibility, the the teacher insisted it was a CD even thought we offered to sen d a DVD player.

When the forth CD player was sent and returned, one of the staff decided it was time to visit the room (which we should have done at least two CD players ago) with a DVD player to test our theory. Lo and behold it was a DVD not a CD.

A couple of lessons were learned. First that we should have personally investigated after the second CD player was returned. And secondly never send any AV equipment off for repair without making sure it really isn't working like the teacher claims. I imagine our AV repair department wondered why two perfectly good CD players were sent to them for "repair". At least I didn't send all four of the units.

Bad Technology "Karma"

Have you ever met any one that computers and other forms of technology just don't seem to like? Working in a high school I frequently meet both those who would be considered digital natives and immigrants who seem to have bad karma when it comes forms of technology.

One foreign language teacher in particular comes to mind. It would seem that inanimate as they maybe the computers in our library's lab had an aversion to her. No matter what computer she sat down at, it was almost guaranteed to lock up, malfunction or otherwise misbehave. At one point the curriculum specialist from downtown had mandated that all Spanish teacher use a particular site with their students. She spent many a frustrating planning period attempting to just access the programs. While the other Spanish teachers were busy using the web site with their students, she finally gave up in despair.

Now least we think that the problem was because she was not hip on using computers like the younger generation she taught, let me just say that I have met not infrequently students that tell me that our computers don't like them. They will tell you that every time they are on the computer something out of the ordinary happens to them.

The moral of this tale? I think that we all have to approach the people we serve in our library setting whether young or not so young with compassion. Not everyone is comfortable using technology. We need to be careful that we do not make them feel inadequate because they are having trouble getting the computer they are using to do what they need it to do....

And let me also say that this bad "karma" does end with computers. I have met folks especially teachers that copier, overhead, DVD players don't like. I will save the story of the teacher and the CD for another blog.

What Makes a Digtial Native Different From Us Immigrants?

As I was working on the interview paper for the class a thought occurred to me about one of the major differences between natives and immigrants in the digital world. Prensky talks about the fact that natives learn and process information differently. While this may be true, I also think that there are many of oldsters out there that grew up studying with the TV and/or stereo playing so I think the change has been more on the line of a continuum rather than something that happened beginning with the 80's. As an aside, I have observed that my three children all born in the 1980's use the social networking tools to varying degrees.

Where I think the biggest difference between natives and immigrants comes in how much emphasis one places on the importance of many of these technologies and applications in their lives. My husband could probably run rings around many of the average teens when it comes to operating or trouble shooting computers or using certain computer apps. For instance the other day a student using the library's computer lab was attempting to open a document saved on his home computer. He was having a great deal of trouble getting the file to open. In talking with him, the young man had no idea what type of computer the file had been completed on- Mac or PC-or the name of the word processing program he had used.

Where the kids of today especially the tweens and teens show they are native speakers of digital is not in being computer or even information savy but in the emphasis they place on staying connected. While both my husband and I have Facebook accounts we are not on them on a daily let alone hourly basis updating our peers on the least of our activities. Neither do we feel a need to stay in constant touch with our "peeps" as one student termed them via cell-phone and text.

I also wonder how this need to stay connected will play out as they move into the working world. My Facebook, e-mail, and virtual book club posts often languish for days because I don't have the time to be constantly updating. What I place as a priority in my life is different.

Living in the Land of Digital Natives and Immigrants

Working in a school library gives me an opportunity to observe both digital natives and digital immigrants in their natural habitat so to speak. It would be too simplistic however to say that all the students are digital natives and all the teachers are digital immigrants considering that we have fair amount of younger teachers having graduated from college in the past five years.

It would also be unfair to say even the older teachers are not digitally literate. I took an informal non-scientific poll a while back to see how if any of my library assistant-all of whom are Juniors and Seniors in high school-knew anything about Second Life. Not a one of the 14 kids-did I mention this was very unscientific-had ever heard of it. On the other hand several teachers knew exactly what I was talking about and one was even an active participant. This teacher interestingly enough is in his mid to late thirties.

Over the course of the next few weeks I hope to share thought, insights and happenings both funny and sad about my corner of the technology world and its occupants.