One of my colleagues teased me the other day about my favorite word--efficient. I love for things to be efficient. For me efficiency is the point where ease, time, and effectiveness meet and celebrate. That is the ultimate use of technology and it amazes me that some teachers do not take advantage of all it can offer. When I first started teaching, I looked at the giant army green file cabinet in my room and was not sure what to do with it. I would go into other teachers' rooms and they would tug open one drawer and it would be stuffed to the point of being immovable with copies of lessons, worksheets, and I am not sure what else. Mine stayed empty. I created files for it, but the only thing that really lives there are pieces of articles I print for reference or samples of student work that I don't use for lessons.
It's my computer drive that is full. I have files organized by units and theme. Everything I have created for the past several years is saved on my drive. It is great. If I don't like how a lesson worked, instead of beginning from scratch, I tweak it until it works. When others need documents I don't have to go flipping through papers, I just click through my organized files and documents and email them; which is great, because the receiver is able to put their own stamp on it if it doesn't quite work for them.
Promethean is great. I would lose transparencies, so now there are not worries as I easily play whatever the lesson is onto the wall. I can add videos to provide background knowledge with no worries and save it in a file for next year (wheels are not to be recreated). Plus, with all this talk about student data excel is my sweetheart. How many is 73% of our population? No problem because it is automatically done in the file. Yeah. I can save my time for the things that matter--one on one with my students.
Want to know the answers fast? Check out: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101343866
No comments:
Post a Comment