Second Life Education Research

I was recently contracted to work at a local high school a few days a week helping the teachers in the English department learn to integrate their new Linux machines into their pedagogy. It’s a fantastic opportunity to gain a more thorough understanding of the obstacles teachers face when utilizing technology in the classroom. Plus, I get to help some really great teachers and hopefully improve the quality of English education in my community. It’s all good.

Yesterday was my first day on the job. I walked up to the school and it was totally dark inside. The doors were locked and there wasn’t a student in sight even though the parking lot was full of cars. A policeman (who is also the head of tech support for the county school corp) eventually came out and let me in. Turns out the school was having a lock down drill to practice in the event of a gunman or otherwise dangerous event. There were dogs roaming the halls and students were crouched in their classrooms behind locked doors. After an hour the drill ended. What an experience and what a way to start my new job.

I spent the day yesterday meeting with principals, assistant principals, guidance counselors, tech support, and the technology director for the school corp. The relationship between the teachers and the tech guys is amazing. There is an animosity there you could cut with a knife. Teachers feel unsupported by the tech dept. They have new computers in their classrooms that don’t work. Their students sneak around and steal mice, surf to Myspace (which is totally forbidden) and generally have a disrespect for the machines. The tech guys believe that all students are out to destroy the computers (which is mostly right) and that the teachers don’t understand the process necessary to maintain the machines. To the credit of the three tech guys, they service three-five different schools (1700+ computers) and spend much of their day driving around between the schools. It’s a fascinating dynamic. I hope that my presence as a sort of intermediary will help both sides understand the situation a bit more.

Right now the plans are to install Moodle on a server and make it available to all teachers. I’ll provide training to the teachers in the English dept and then model some assignments they can use in their classes. So far so good.

On another note, if you haven’t been into a high school lately…woof! I graduated thirteen years ago (I’m ancient I know) and apparently I’ve forgotten what a nightmare it must be to be a high school student. They seem clumsy, awkward and they all smell funny (no joke there, it’s a building jam packed with hormones). The teachers have to teach while policing behavior you’d never run into at the college level. Hall passes, bathroom passes, annoying bells, clanging lockers, cafeteria trays, bathrooms without doors. Ah those were the good days. Funny thing is I don’t remember any of that from my high school days. Perhaps our brain is a better ally than we give it credit for and I’ve blocked it out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 7:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.