This week almost all the teachers I know are back to school, prepping lessons, collecting papers, and trying to find enough time to get all of the work done in a professional and thoughtful manner. And the question rings out across the land "is there a better way?" We have been told that teaching out of the filing cabinet is no good. We need to be responsive to the kids in front of us, we need to differentiate, we need to empower student voice and choice; all of this is true. But does this mean we need to start from a blank slate each day, semester or year?
When I started teaching we had 3 main media, photocopies, overheads, and chalk. I remember when laser printers became popular and we were able to create printed overheads, it was amazing, finally we had a media that looked good and we could reuse. The quest was to develop the perfect materials that we could use year after year. As the technology shifted and chalk gave way to white boards (for the record I am more allergic to green markers than I ever was to chalk dust, grumble), I started building resources on my tcomputer.
I have, somewhere, disks of handouts collected and developed as I tried to figure out how to get middle schoolers excited about grammar. These disks became a Dropbox folder, and then a Google Drive folder, and an Evernote notebook. Once I started thinking about interaction with content more than delivery, I added a blog, a Google site, and countless other small sites and services.
With so many options of collecting, creating, and sharing content, I struggle to be sure that I am doing all of this the right way. It isn't that teachers are lazy, it is that we want to be efficient. The time I spend creating, storing, and retrieving content is time I am taking from something else. (My family, my grading, my workout).
Last year was my first year as a tech integration specialist. I decided to teach mostly from blogs. I was working from a truly clean slate and all of the content I had created and collected over 12 years of writing and literature instruction was of no use to me. I lined the shelves of the tech lab with it because I had no where else to put it. This summer I packed most of it up, leaving some notebooks and the more general pedagogy texts, along with a fe hundred gigabytes of work on and external hard drive. I scanned much of the oldest work into Evernote so I could get to it without it taking up space we need for student projects in the MakerSpace.
Even with last years lessons on the blog I find that in the first week of class it is a whole new game. Last year's "getting to know the iPad" lesson took 50 minutes, and this year it took 15. So how I teach the kids in front of me and prepare for the next time I am teaching? Is it possible?
More and more I prepare into outlines instead of detailed notes. I try to create resources that are about concepts instead of screenshots, but largely I assume that by the next time I teach a tool, resource, process, or site everything will be different.
How are you teaching for today while preparing for the future? If you have a good solution, share it. We all want to know.
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