Skoolz Out!

The recent holiday break has reminded me of a number of things – how organised I am at work and with all things digital, yet my working space at home, personal calendars, and resources are completely disorganised – much to the frustration of my wife and friends who tolerate this. The recent ‘family clean up’ of these spaces (which continues) reminded me of a number of things I have been trying to do in my new role as a technology facilitator at a primary school.

This year, I have the unique role where I am supporting teachers in the classroom to develop effective technology skills throughout the entire curriculum. These may be individual ‘tutorials’, small group or team teaching projects. 

No matter which class or year level I am in, it is obvious that all teachers need to be organised. We thrive on it. Some of us will spend hours developing one lesson, while others will know where a specific pen will be at any stage in their classroom. 

So why are teachers so disorganised when it comes digital resources? What impact does this have for our students?

This became one of the most important aspects to my role this year – organisation of resources. If teachers are having trouble finding or sharng their work, then it simply won’t happen. As we are focusing heavily on incorporating Interactive Whiteboards as a tool into our teaching, it has become vital that teachers need to have a common location where they can search for resources and save their own creations.

In doing this we are promoting a number of things – 21st Century technology skills, accessing more interactive and visual resources into our lessons, and promoting collaboration between the staff. 

Although my role is technology, there is still plenty to learn about – as there always is. As I have been researching and reading more about the variety of tools available, I have realised that simply loading the resources into folders on a server is not adequate.

The variety of open source software available to create searchable libraries is substantial. These libraries can create visuals of your resources, allow teachers to easily search them and house them all in the one place. One of the most important skills it will promote to the teachers, and skills they should be sharing with their students is uploading resources, and ‘tagging,’ ‘categorising’ and adding ‘favourites’ for future use. 

These features are key components of all types of Web 2.0 software such as blogs, flickr, YouTube, etc, and even in the last few updates of the Apple iLife software. In an age where we are bombarded with information and resources, we need to teach our students how to manage them efficiently, as well as be productive contributors.

Some of the software I have found so far that seems to cater for these needs include; Razuna, ccHost, and Huddle.

If you have any experience or knowledge in this area, I would love to hear from you.