Ten years ago I was a PE teacher at a
Sports Specialist College in the UK. I had completed my teacher training and
had two years of teaching experience under my belt. At this point in my career
I had very little experience of using ICT in my teaching at all. Nothing that
really went beyond writing up my lesson plans using my school laptop and using PowerPoint
in lessons.
Outside of education my knowledge of using
ICT didn’t really go beyond playing Xbox.
My mobile looked like this:
My home computer looked like this:
I had been saving my work on these:
And my interactive theory activities took place using laminates and an overhead projector:
ICT in education was not my strength and
looking back, it was something that I hadn’t really even considered too much.
In a practical subject such as PE, it was something that hadn’t really been
exposed to me as an area for development.
Then one day I took the first step into
turning this weakness into strength, purely accidentally.
I wanted to create a PowerPoint that taught
the anatomy of the Human skeleton. I had a very clear image in my head of how I
wanted it to be. I wanted the bones to be presented, in place, one at a time,
with their titles, in order to gradually build up the skeleton.
I searched and searched on what was then,
still a relatively emerging internet, probably using ‘Ask Jeeves’ for images of
the skeleton that I could use to develop my PowerPoint, but they didn’t seem to
exist. A feeling that I imagine we have all experienced.
At this point it became clear that if I was
to create my PowerPoint then I would have to draw the images myself. The only
programs that I had any real knowledge of was Word and PowerPoint and the draw
tools on these two applications do not offer the ability to draw anything that
would even closely resemble a simple human bone, let alone a skull or pelvis.
I approached the only person I knew that
had experience of computers, my Dad. He told me to install an application
called Adobe Illustrator CS2 (now up to its 7th generation), a
specialist drawing software. This is an industry standard piece of software and
if you only have experience of computer art through Word and PowerPoint then it
is not especially intuitive or obvious how to use.
My dad drew the first simple bone for me in
about 5 minutes, just to show me the basics of how to use the tools. Then it
was up to me.
The Pen tool in Illustrator does not
operate the same as using a pen and paper. You can’t just draw a line and have
it appear on screen, as you would initially expect. The Pen tool operates more
like a pin and thread scenario where you have to plant a pin and then join it
to another pin using a thread.
I hated this! I could not get my head
around it. It was not easy for me; it was a source of great frustration, as
every click I made seemed to lead to a mistake. Drawing an image that I could
have drawn by hand in a matter of seconds was taking hours.
No matter how many times I asked my dad to
come and draw the images for me, as it would take him a fraction of the time,
he refused. As if he did it for me then I would never learn.
At that point I had a decision to make.
Invest the time, keep on and attempt to complete my images (there are a lot of
bones in the Human body) or give up and stick with the old presentation.
I am pleased to say that I made the right
choice, and I stuck at it. This gave me the realization that it was possible
for me to develop the resources that I require using ICT if I could not find
what I needed readily available.
The fact that I do not have a built in knowledge
of technology and that nearly everything I have learned I have learned from
scratch, I believe, makes me a better teacher of how to teach and use the
technology. I am very familiar with the pitfalls and frustrations that occur
because it happened to me in the very recent past and continues to happen to me
as technology evolves.
So, what’s the point of this reflection?
Looking back, the situation that I found
myself in back then may well be and probably will be, a situation that many
students find themselves in on a daily basis.
Presented with a situation where learning
something new is frustrating, time consuming, painful, confusing….
And as Teachers we constantly encourage
pupils to persist, don’t give up after the first attempt, learn from your
failures, embrace making mistakes.
The likelihood is that students will only
learn to accept this encouragement from their mentors if they can see it being
modeled in a very real way.
Is it evident to students that we as
teachers are continual learners who embrace making mistakes, learn from our
failures and persist in the face of frustration?
When it comes to the use of technology do
we persist and learn something new that may further develop our teaching or do
we quit after the first frustration or technical issue.
Do we embrace the mistakes and frustrations
that are part and parcel of integrating technology, modeling to students that
learning is lifelong… or do we model to pupils to stick to what you know, if
something goes wrong the first time then never use it again, if you find
something frustrating then just forget about it.
