You Have to Wonder

With all the mayhem happening in the school district, I have to wonder what is going to happen to student's ability have access to technology and to learn the necessary information literacy skills. The school I worked at received a grant to install smart boards and four teachers completed the training to be able to use these highly technical boards. Now one of the teachers has been displaced to a middle school and another is being moved to another class room. The smart boards? They are staying in the rooms in which they were installed as it is too expensive to move them. The teachers being moved into the rooms with these boards have no idea how to use them.

English classes next year will have 35+ students in each section. So each teacher will have about 120 students. That not only raises the question of how does one teacher writing skills effectively to that many students-the paper grading alone will have to be staggering-but how do you go about teaching research skills, especially the skills needed to use a computer effectively in research, when the library only has 28 computers in its lab.

So will the smart boards survive, how does one approach teaching how to do an effective Internet search when you don't have enough computers? Well I won't know the answer, as I learned yesterday that my position has been cut and I am displaced with no place to currently go. So our high school will join the ranks of many others with one media specialist and no assistant.