Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're taking a breath.
subscribe | unsubscribe | comments | twitter | about
Learned actually has its roots as a productivity blog, years ago and platforms away, but it's a subject that's come up more than once here and I'm going to revisit it again this week.
I grew up in the U.S., where the school calendar was set by the agricultural needs of the 18th century. I now live in Japan, where the school calendar was dictated by the opening and closing of the fiscal year. So my innate sense of when things begin and end is at serious odds with my current schedule. Right now, heading into October, I feel like I ought to be settling into the new school year and instead I'm getting ready to launch the second semester. Not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's a chance for me to take a last, deep breath and assess the previous semester and plan the current one.
Toolbox. Sure. Photo by Susan Holt Simpson on Unsplash
A big part of that deep breath, for me, is re-assessing my current digital toolkit and adding or subtracting as necessary; since the last time I did one of these posts, teaching has moved online and a host of new tools have become de facto defaults and I'm not very comfortable with a lot of those tools yet. More importantly, nobody is comfortable using the same tools. Some groups have become Zoom masters, others are great with Skype, still others have wrangled Teams into a workable beast. Getting all these people on the same page is problematic, at best.
And how about the students? Much has been made of Japan's technology gap where students can do amazing things with a cell phone but don't know how to send an email on a computer or paste a file into a bulletin board system. A big part of this is that a lot of families don't have a computer at home. Or, if they do, it's the laptop issued to Dad by his company that no one else is allowed to use. But they have plenty of phones and tablets around. It's weird.
Anyway, the result of all this, at least as far as my thinking goes, is that I'm going to be making heavy use of two of the oldest tools in the digital toolbox: the PDF and the JPG. It feels slightly ridiculous.
I mean, all those tools I mentioned above - Zoom has a whiteboard built in (and it's a real pain to use for anything more than the briefest of comments), Skype has...nothing really. And Teams has the entire Microsoft Office suite built into it if you can get it all to function at the same time without crashing your computer or your network connection. So, PDFs and JPGs.
The advantages here are simple. I can make PDFs quickly and easily through both Pages and Word, giving me a nice, cleanly laid out document that can be read by damn near everything, including a web browser. Likewise, I can make JPGs with captions, "stickers," and lots of other notation and annotation in just a few clicks of the mouse and, again, JPGs can be opened and seen by just about every piece of software currently on the market.
Digital toolkit. Sure. Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
So, why does it feel so off? It seems to me that in the rush to get everything online, administrators and teachers tried to find one-size-fits-all classroom replacement software which a) just doesn't exist, and b) what software is out there was designed for business meetings with planned presentations and pitches and not classroom give-and-take.
I guess...here are two thoughts that kind of exemplify what I mean: when I started teaching, we worked in small rooms that held only enough chairs for the students and a small desk (I taught small groups of no more than five students). No technology. None. We could bring in a paper and a pen and that was about it. By the time I stopped working at that job, I, and just about every teacher I know, was an expert cartoonist, diagrammer, and annotation specialist.
When I was in university, I worked as a distance-learning-classroom operator. And in those classrooms, we had ALL the technology. Cameras, microphones, computers, monitors, everything. And most teachers found that the tech that worked best was the overhead camera (like an overhead projector for showing people what you're writing on a piece of paper).
I think that's my point. All these different systems and toolboxes and what I want is a piece of paper. Unfortunately, while the technology to replicate blackboards and pieces of scratch paper does exist, it's expensive and not well-integrated yet, so I'm back to my PDFs and JPGs.
If you're out there, teaching or getting ready to, and you have some better tools in your kit, let me know in the comments or through email. I could use the help.
subscribe | unsubscribe | comments | twitter | about
Until next week, stay safe, stay curious. Learn something,
Joel