Since 2015, I have been convinced that technology is the answer to making teachers lives easier. There is so much talk of not enough time & being overworked! I'm not arguing that it's not true. My gripe with this talk of no time and workload is that not enough of us actually do anything about it other than complain about it. Last year, my argument within my ACHPER presentation about the challenge of creating a culture within a school that has an embedded whole school approach to health PE is that it is near on impossible to create one because of the workload of a classroom teacher. And whilst we can champion it and recruit others to the cause will help create this culture, the real answer is using technological tools to better manage our time more effectively.
"Great idea Crowy!" some will see. "But when will I get the time to do be able to learn how to use these tools?" #SIGH We have to make time. We have to invest it out of hours. Just like we invest money into a savings account. The pay off won't be instantaneous. But in the future, that small time investment of our time will open up hours and hours of time in the future. Yesterday, a friend of mine showed how powerful investing time to explore technology can be. And it is an absolute game changer. It is why I'm writing this at 6am on a Saturday morning. Our whole staff is going to benefit from this enormously. Before I explain how, let me give you some back story. I am probably lucky that in my first year of teaching, our Leadership Team decided to become a pilot school in this new thing called a PLC (Professional Learning Community). It was huge in America, but new in Australia. That was nearly 7 years ago we started doing it. And 5 years down the track we were the 2nd school in Australia to be recognised as a PLC. Pretty cool, considering how many schools in Victoria are becoming PLC's now. A big part of PLC is collaboration. And one thing we have been doing for three years is use Google Docs for planning. Every Year Level Team has time set aside within the timetable to plan for next weeks lessons together. Each teacher is able to write into the same document at the same time. This is fantastic, as all the resources are in the one spot with any links and information we will need. However, for all its benefits, we have noticed that it has inadvertently caused a few productivity issues.
There is just TOO many documents! Over the course of 18 months, I can remember 3 clear instances where I have shown staff examples of how powerful docs, slides, forms and sheets can be. In hindsight, they probably weren't presented clearly. And I should have known from my writing about a whole school approach to PE, people have so many other things happening that it's hard to get excited about something you don't know about, or don't initially see the benefit of. And again, many peoples answer to these suggestions of the best way to learn how to use them is to play around themselves is: “I don’t have the time to figure that out or do it because I’m so busy”. Until yesterday, when someone did it! A friend of mine had been playing around with putting the planner into a Google Sheet. Having looked over it yesterday, a number of things struck me that were better than what we are doing currently.
I hope from this now other staff members will see how beneficial investing time into technology will reap rewards for them in the future. Those few nights my colleague put into developing this new document will save her hours every week. Add that up over the year and that’s huge. All it took was a bit of work in the beginning. And it clearly illustrates that complaining about our workload gets us nowhere. Being proactive about finding ways to save us time on administrative tasks through technology is going to help solve the problem of teacher workload.
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AboutThis blog has been created to share my thoughts on Teaching. It uses my experiences, thoughts and ideas about a whole range of things related to education. Archives
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