Ten Minute Tech Talks - Keeping Teachers Up-To-Date with Tiny Tech Tidbits

Maybe one of these days I'll write a post about all the things that I love--because it's quite a list.  But, today I feel compelled to come out and tell you about just one of the things that really, really lights me up inside is 🎇💻 technology. 💻🎇

Nope, don't worry, I don't like turning my tiny people into zombies 🤤 by having them zone out on a device.  No, indeedy--not this Edie.  Having students get sucked into a screen drives me up the wall!  I avoid it at all costs.

Instead of poking technology down my students' throats, I prefer using technology to get my own st*ff together so I can do a better job of teaching efficiently while I'm face to face with my genius students.  That means I try to find the best ways of managing my correspondence, my calendar, my files and all the rest of my teacher junk, so I have bandwidth left to really be present with them and enjoy every moment of their blooming brilliance.

For me, technology is all about efficiency.  And, as I teach my kindergarten and first grade students, efficient is the fancy word for being clever and lazy at the same time.  Teaching takes up a whole lot of energy, just like learning does, and I teach them that they will want to save their energy for when they need it!

I also like to joke, mainly with adults, that my name--Edie--starts with E because E is for "Efficiency."  Of course, then I also need to explain that my name also ends with E because that's my "Redundance-E."  Ya know, because maybe you don't want to be so efficient that you miss out on something important.  So keep a little extra--even if that means you aren't actually completely efficient.

Efficient Technology Tips for Teachers

Some time ago, my district began rolling out 1:1 technology for our rather large urban school system.  Well, my lucky school drew the shortest straw, so we were slated to get our 1:1 technology last of all--arriving in fall of 2020--a mere 6 years after the first roll out.  In fact, we are group 6 to get this tech, labeled G6, for short.  (And yes, we have made free to groove to really inappropriate lyrics about the party-lifestyle that most teachers don't subscribe to, courtesy of Far East Movement.)

At my school, a couple of tech-lovers like me didn't adore the idea of being Luddites until the technology lightning bolt was visited upon us in year 6.  So we formed a tech team--and that is where I met my fabulous upper-grades colleague Heather.  Since admin wasn't sold on spending a lot of time on technology professional development, Heather came up with the idea of 10 Minute Tech Talks.  The idea with 10m Tech was to give staff a toe dip into some of the most essential or most useful tech tools for teachers so they wouldn't be terribly behind all the tech trends by the time we got 1:1 tech in G6.  Together, Heather and I presented a bunch of 10m talks to staff to teach them some fun and interesting things that we hoped they could use right away.

Like all things, some of these tech tips took and some fell a little flat.  Initially we just presented the tech tips for 10 minutes...and, after a little while, I started making slide decks that include all of the info we were teaching so they could be archived for reuse.  Occasionally I co-created these slide decks and ALWAYS I got feedback from some genius colleagues to make them better.  I want to make sure to give credit to all of them, rather thank pretend that I came up with this all on my own!  So thank you to Heather Drenk, Andrea Nelson, Monica Drinkwine, Dana Prager, Sharon Jimenez, Dixie Lane, Kristi Betzwieser, Shari Nelson, Peg Keeler, and Mary Seidl for all your input, inspiration, and feedback.

Well, here is the archive!  I threw it all in an Awesome Table--and that Awesome Table is still alive.  I keep adding to it as our Tech Team keeps presenting 10m Tech Talks!

(Because Blogger only lets me embed a haphazard version of the table, click here to get the full version)