Yesterday a very effective and technology savvy teacher became frustrated. We were working together on updates to her website. In the past 5 years we have had many changes in technology applications and it does seem ridiculous to continue to teach and reteach simple things that really just need tweaking.
Our elementary teachers have used Appleworks, Microsoft Word, First Class and now Pages to make weekly newsletters for classroom communication. Each of these applications have had extremely different ways in which to save and upload to our district website. Images, calendars and other assorted extras that make a difference to how the website looks are changed too. The teachers just want a way to have a website without needing an advanced degree in technology and can be changed in a few minutes time.
User friendly (in this case teacher friendly) technology is critical if you want people to be enthusiastic partners in our quest to partner with school, community and parents.
Often I have asked myself if new is better. Many times I have thought that applications from the not so distant past did a remarkable job in keeping things simpler and user friendly. I can agree most heartily with my fellow educators in regards to wanting to keep things for longer than a year or two. One just gets proficient at using something and just as fast, something new comes along and we have to change AGAIN!!!!
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