Richard's Not Really a Blog Teacher Blog

   vs.     Just the other day, the school where I am teaching suffered an internet outage that lasted for two days. The reaction to this by both students and teachers alike was the same...absolute panic. I really thought this might be the beginning of the apocalypse. I am surprised people weren't rushing to the grocery store to empty the shelves of all the milk and toilet paper. It was, to put lightly, a very stressful situation. However, this little event did make me hyperaware of how dependent we have become to technology in the classroom. Education and digital content have become so intertwined that they have practically formed a symbiotic relationship with one another. Gone are the days of my childhood when classroom technology translated to an overhead projector or a TV and VCR on a rolling cart. Those days of a class consisting of a teacher lecturing from the front of the class uninterrupted for an hour are history. Technology has enhanced the way teachers...

  When I was an undergraduate back in the late 1990's, one of my degrees was in Communications. Now back in this day, the term "communications" had a more limited scope than it does today. This was a time before social media...before Twitter, before Tik Tok, and yes...even before Facebook. The communication we were taught during my course of study focused primarily on face-to-face interpersonal communication. Professors taught us about proper use of rhetoric, the importance of nonverbal communication, and how to effectively and efficiently transmit verbal information. Despite all the hours of classes, stacks of written papers, and time dedicated to reading and studying the craft of communication, decades later I can really recall only one primary lesson..."The message you intend to say is not necessarily the message others hear." As obvious as that sounds, I have found that many people forget this simple fact. All people are products of their environment and exp...

       When I was a high school student in the early to mid-1990's, I can remember those rare moments when it was time to watch a video in class. It was like Halley's Comet - all of us students knew this day would one day happen, and now that it has arrived, it's time to celebrate and alert all of our friends to the big news. While this may be a bit of a hyperbole, it is not too far from the truth. A teacher showing a video in class required a great deal of effort - borrowing the TV/VCR cart from the library, wheeling that rickety cart to the classroom, and then overcoming the technological deficiencies of the VHS cassette. These obstacles usually meant that teachers would show an entire two-hour video when only ten minutes were really needed to supplement the lesson.     In the modern classroom, technological access has improved to such a degree that teachers are able to effortlessly present short-form digital videos with the click...