I’ve been managing change quietly under the radar so few have noticed the tremendous technical transformation our small Title One elementary schools has undergone in just a few years.
We’ve gone from people only doing email and most nothing with their class, to being on the forefront of technology — and our teaching staff is still at the frustration level.
It was in the Matrix when Agent Smith said none of the participants believed reality when it wasn’t a struggle. And struggle we do.
This week three of our teachers were perplexed, and a bit outraged, that Voicethread had no methodology for dealing with multiple years of classes in a single teacher account. For the past three to five years, many of these teachers have used Voicethread, and when they add students, the student go to the bottom of the queue. So this year’s students have to scroll down through 90 users to find their icon and make a comment.
They don’t want to delete past year students, because they are building on the previous contribution and using it for models. When they delete prior year’s students, all the students’ comments disappear.
They contacted Voicethread independent of me, and worked through the issue. Voicethread, as a young company, hadn’t come across this issue (probably because they don’t have many other teachers who have been using it for that long) and didn’t have a work around.
The teachers then came to me and complained. I didn’t have an answer, because our county has recently purchased Voicethread but truncated the feature set. And reading over the correspondance with Voicethread, all the bases had already been covered.
My teachers were outraged. “Ridiculous!” was what one said (and only because it was the most outrageous she was willing to get in email).
Of course, what most of the teachers in my building don’t know is they are alone. Most of the teachers in the county don’t know what Voicethread is, don’t have WordPress or many of the other things with which my colleagues are wrestling.
So as I said in Twitter this past weekend. Thanks