It's in the DNA - Adventures Through Time with Technology

Don't Let Age Stop You!

Isn’t it just time to stop? Retirement isn’t far below the horizon, so isn’t it time to kick back and rely on your time-honored notes and not care a hoot about the latest apps or whatever they’re called? Hell no! If you’re in your fifties, like I am, we grew up with technology. We are the generation that was brought up with satellites, moon walks, and color television.

Anyone for Pong?

We ruined our parent’s television screens by forever etching the Pong court on to them after countless hours of play.  We know technology, we are technology. 

Back in the UK, I had the first affordable home computer, the Sinclair ZX81.  The ZX81 was a super powerful machine with a massive 16KB of memory.  I bought the additional 16KB RAM pack for it, it was the size of a brick and didn’t fit well.  The ZX81 saved to cassette tapes which meant that it was slow, really slow, and it was very unreliable.  Once my ZX81 ate three hundred lines of code – one at a time – the screen blinked with each lost line of code.  I swear that the thing was laughing at me.

Over the years, I got through numerous useless home computers until I bought a Commodore Amiga.

This had a disc drive, real software applications like WordPerfect, and a WIMPS environment – Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers.  It could be used by anyone- even today.  My first PC followed the Amiga.  With its massive 60MB hard drive, it had all the memory that I would ever need and then some. My first PC was followed by many, many more including laptops, notebooks, and PCs – many of which I built myself.  I now have at least 10TB of storage at home – It’s all that I’ll ever need, and then some!

Cell Phones are Mobile and Handy

I bought my first Motorola cell phone in 1993.  As I lived in the UK, we called it a mobile phone and my girlfriend of the time, who had lived in Germany, called it a handy  The battery lasted about ten minutes and the calls dropped frequently.  I remember calling my mother and telling her that I was going to be late leaving my house to visit her.  She was clearly disappointed but also rather distracted because her doorbell was ringing.

She was so surprised to find me standing at her front door, cell phone in hand.  That was the sort of gag that can only be performed once at a single point in time. 

By the mid-nineties, I was texting up to my limit of thirty a month and loving it.  The UK seemed to be ahead of the US when it came to texting. When I first moved here in 2003, I noticed that very few people were texting.  This changed very quickly – my daughter peaked at about 10,000 texts per month and is a prime candidate for repetitive strain injury in the future! 

Shapes of Things to Come

I worked on a project for Sony in about 2000, they were about to launch a phone with a color screen that had quite a high definition.  I was a part of a team that developed a web navigation interface for the device.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get the contract. If we had, I would be writing this Blog from my private island next to Richard Branson’s.

Technology - It has to Have a Real Use

If you’re my age, technology is in your DNA. If it isn’t, where the heck have you been?  However, maybe I’m getting old and enfeebled but I don’t believe in technology for technology’s sake.  Sometimes, telling someone something is just as educationally successful as making them use an app on the internet and playing a game for five minutes before he or she accesses the important information.  Traditional teaching has its place and should be nurtured, cherished, and nursed until it is off the endangered list.  It’s a very useful and important part of any educator’s toolkit.  That being said, traditional teaching is not the only learning method anymore.  It is one tool amongst many, and technology is bringing us more methods of learning on a daily basis.

We risk being overwhelmed by the sheer number of new technologies.  We are adaptable and we are interested, but we are only human.  We have lives and there are still only twenty-four hours in a day – sometimes it can be too much.  We have to be discerning customers when we consider what educational technology to use in our classrooms.  At times, we have no choice when we are forced to use a certain application, learning management systems etc.  If this is the case, we have to work with what we have.  Most systems require a little getting used to, but they usually work.  My worry is that many teachers, myself included, are leaving the education walled-garden and using the internet to find apps that will appeal to both us and our students.  Apps that will help them to learn faster and better.  The problem is that not all apps are developed to a high standard, not all are equally funded, not all are updated frequently, and not all will be around next semester when you need them.  If we’re not careful, we run the risk of investing a great deal of time, effort, and money in apps that give us transitory benefit at best (Kelly, 2016).  Not all apps are created equal.

They're Out to Get You!

Obviously, it’s tough out there on the interweb thingy.  There are many sites that will take your details, money, identity, and then the rest of your money.  Many sites have been set up to mimic popular sites with the sole intention of parting us fools from our hard-earned cash.   Teachers can be prime targets for this sort of nefarious activity.  We frequently spend our own money funding our own classes and this includes subscribing to the “full” versions of the apps and other software.  Sometimes they are worth the upgrade e.g. ScreenCastOMatic, and sometimes not.  Let’s be careful out there people. 

When selecting software apps to use in your classroom I would use the following rules:

• A fool and his money are easily parted.
• Understand the risks of being an early adopter – make sure the benefits are really really heavy!
• Check for a date on the site, if it says © 2008 then you’ll be able to hear an echo because there’s nobody there.
• When selecting an app, make sure that it has some good reviews.  Search on Google for reviews that aren’t on the app’s own site!
• If you cannot test an app before they take your money, then don’t buy the app.
• Only upgrade if you need to.  Most sites provide a free trial version of their apps.  These are usually cut-down versions of the full app and many can be used successfully without paying for an upgrade as long as you don’t mind adverts on or around your work.
• If you are paying for apps or to upgrade apps, you should use services like PayPal, the Apple store, or the Play store. Try not to use a debit card because you don’t have the same protection as provided when using a credit card.

And Get you Again!

While we are on the subject of people trying to get hold of your money, if someone calls you from “Microsoft Support Center”, who is obviously from India but expects to you to believe that his name is Kevin, telling you that there is something wrong with your PC (out of the billions of PCs in this world they phone you about yours) – please feel free to use the following retort – “You are a crook, a conman, and a thief.  I curse you and your family for a thousand generations.  I require $500,000 to remove the curse.  Goodbye”.  I once had one of the callers, called Edward, on the line for over twenty minutes before he finally agreed that it was a con and promised to lead a better and more wholesome life – he was probably lying.  My brother fell for this con and had to pay $99 to have his PC “fixed”.  These con-artists have a great business model.  The take a relatively small amount of money, do no harm, and don’t steal your personal details.  They rely on making their victim feel relieved that their “problem” has been spotted by experts and "fixed".

Time Will Not be Saved

Embracing technology and carefully selecting useful apps with good reviews will NOT save you a second of time (Wolf, 2007).  You will not be able to relax and have a nice snooze while you students’ brains suck in information and develop understanding like super beings.  It just will not happen.  You’ll be front-loading your lessons in your own time, monitoring and helping your students in class and then trying to figure out how to get useful feedback out of the now stupid app that you wish that you had never heard of – again in your own time!  To add insult to injury, you bosses will assume that using apps frees up your time and they will pile more work on you – you have been warned. 

We Can Know Everything - Now!

Technology has given us wonderful tools that we can use to improve the learning environment for our students.  We can now give them the world on multiple screens of different resolutions and sizes.  Our students have most of the acquired mass of human knowledge at their fingertips 24/7.  But, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – especially when you don’t know what to do with it, when you don’t have context, and when you don’t have a dedicated human teacher to provide structure and support and to point you in the right direction with patients and a smile. 

Innovation happens all of the time, but watching something grow from nothing, e.g. computing and cell phones, means that you never lose the feeling that they’re just a little magic.

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