I'm Tired. I'm Frustrated. I'm Angry.

I can't believe it's been so long since I posted last. Or maybe I can. I'm tired. I'm frustrated. And I'm angry. I'm tired of not having reliable access to the internet at school. I have been keeping a diary for the last year of all the network errors I encounter during the course of the day, and there are so many! This is just when I actually want to use it (of course, typically when a lesson revolved around something required on the internet); who knows how much more often it actually is! I'm frustrated. I've skipped out on ICT committee meetings since this time last year, when I realised that I am the only department person who shows up regularly, and that the meetings accomplish nothing for students/staff. I attended the most recent, briefly, which mostly discussed how we're going to keep the kids from using the new high-speed broadband network. I understand that while much of this is the laziness factor on the part of certain people, a part of it is also financial, and that's frustrating too. I'm angry. Our department had a vacancy last year, and it was advertised as "leading the school in technology integration." Well, thanks for the kind words! However, the person hired was NOT impressed when they arrived (from overseas). They feel a bit hustled. I'm not surprised. I'm angry my students can neither download or upload files for their work, and cannot view youtube at all! Needless to say, this put the breaks on our film wiki project. I ripped my DVD and dumped it into the student data file instead, but what a pain! This is after we were all told off for having too much stuff in our department folders that the server couldn't handle. Well, what do they expect when students have no access? If the kids had access to youtube, they could watch the bit of the film they are analysing without taking up server space. I'm angry the network went down three days in a row during report writing week, for hours at a time (as it does EVERY reporting period). I mean, seriously. If the network can't handle the traffic when it needs to, shouldn't it be UPGRADED? Nothing like last minute pressure to meet report deadlines (NOT EXTENDED [understandably]) during exams, marking, and managing groups of boys who have sat their exams and are ready for the holidays but there's still two weeks to go! If you think I'm angry, spare a thought for those poor staff members who took time away from their own families to work on reports from home using our remote server, which promptly went down and deleted all their work. I'm angry, no, I'm still really, really PEEVED OFF at last year's frustrating episode that some of you will remember. But I feel I have no recourse whatsoever. I'm still so angry about this that I am retraining myself with the ICT curriculum (that's my PD for this year) and considering a change. A major change. This year I've had so little access that the time it takes to set up blogs, wikis, and keeping all of it updated all the time just doesn't seem worth it. And that's sad. What's also sad is how little I feel this year. I no longer go in early, and I leave every day by 4pm. It means I'm super busy when I'm there, but I'm simply not prepared to continue to give and give and give of my home time when nothing changes on the other end. I'm not attending any conferences this year, which makes me sad, but I cannot justify the expense from my household budget when there's no implementation afterwards. Guess what else is sad? I find I'm understanding more and more why other staff simply can't be bothered to get wired. It does take a lot of your time. It does require ongoing upskilling. But...they will not actually be using it in the foreseeable future. Heck, my room doesn't even really have heat, doesn't have any a/c, and definitely doesn't have any computers. I'm tired of fighting for access. I'm frustrated that people still see students using computers as "playing," and I'm angry that I'm not able to prepare my students for their futures. But heck, they can use a pen and paper like nobody's business!

Neoblog - A Teacher's Adventure

alrighty! this blog is my attempt to document my experiences as i learn to use more ict and in turn use it to teach in my english class. please do not talk to me about being a teacher and not using capitals. genre counts - blogs are personal diaries, and i can write however i feel like expressing myself at the time :-P i'm keeping this blog to follow my progress, as i have found using ict in the classroom not only time consuming, but frustrating. as a full time working mother, wife, and individual in my own right, i don't have blocks of time that equal hours and hours to get something to work properly, to download, to whatever, and the lines here in nz are particularly archaic, especially when compared to the speed of dsl in the states, which is where i'm from. however, once i've let the frustration pass, i'm usually game to keep trying. i have lots of what i think are cool ideas, and i want to learn how to implement them. this'll be learn-as-i-go.

let's give you some background. i've always thought of myself as computer literate. started using a computer as soon as they came out, learned a lot of programmes (remember wordstar?), learned DOS, as the university where i worked went online, i learned html, etc etc. i have taught in virtual classrooms, and other classes completely over the net. however, as computer life is like dogyears squared, and i went on to have marriage and family, i found myself further and further away from what is happening now. i do have an online life, and visit various bulletin boards to participate in dialogue about myriad topics on a regular basis. i really enjoy learning about new things from my online friends, and encourage anyone reading this to pass on any sites/tools/whathaveyou you think may be helpful, useful, or simply downright interesting.

currently i teach high school english at a boys' school, so the average age of teens i work with is 15. i am keen to use technology in the classroom, and hopped on the powerpoint bandwagon immediately armed with windvd. i have been teaching myself the basics of ripping and burning, but still have trouble with sound - i want to embed short film clips in to powepoint for lessons to avoid fooling around with two tvs and two dvd players when i'm teaching homage. i have a data projector in my room, mounted on the ceiling, but find that despite the curriculum's call for ict as the way forward, let's face it, school's don't actually have the money to provide the tools for its use. i would love for moving images to be part of what we create - but cannot book a lab at the right times, or have access to appropriate programmes for students to do so. i recently wanted to do what i thought would be a great lesson on women in media - as portrayed in hip hop videos, but spend the bulk of a saturday fooling around downloading video, converting it, then attempting to edit it, with no success - loss of syncronicity in video/sound. i have used both computer labs and student laptops only to find that what i can do on my computer, they cannot do on theirs - no java for students. half of our research project went down the tubes when they could not access surveymonkey or use the kiwiquals successbuilder tool. and that's when the computers work properly in the first place - i cannot recount how many lessons have devolved into chaos from 1) no power, 2) no internet connection, 3) student log ins not linking to the acutal network so they can save their work, 4) students being unable to print from the hostal computers and unable to save that work to the student drive, on and on ad nauseum! bah humbug!

so where do i stand? i love teaching film, static images, and unfamiliar text - the computer is great for that. i use the projector for notes, poetry, and a variety of other things. but i want to dabble more in what my students are doing. i belong to bebo, which is the netoworking site most of the kids here use, and utilise my site to keep a relationship with the kids, as well as provide some study tools for them to use during study leave. i'm keen to help encourage my colleagues to embrace ict, and if i can figure out how to do it myself, i can show them the easy way, and hopefully get more people with the programme. i want to do what i can to lobby my school to provide necessary features to our computers so students can do meaningful work.

i am out of time, so that it all for today!