On September 4th, 1998, Google went live. A week before, on August 28th, I was born to a mother who made a career in web design, branding, and crisis management, and a father who works as a contracted data analyst who writes on the side. Despite growing up with two tech-savvy parents, the largest hole in the toolbox of adult skills is my inability to function in tandem with technology in both my professional and personal life. I will demonstrate the various ways that I have avoided using technology my whole life except when absolutely necessary, and also acknowledge that I look forward to becoming less technophobic after this course.
I remember in first grade that my mother built me a website just for fun. I had been having trouble making friends, and she thought something cool like that with a chat feature for folks I invited to the website would help the other kids think that I was less odd. I remember giving my peers the website link, but no one visited the site. When I lamented to my mom, she made a crucial connection: growing up in a poor southern Louisiana community meant that there was no technology in the classroom, and most of my classmates did not have access to the internet at home. It was only 2004, and my household was ahead of its time for the region. I also remember that because the school district could not afford it, there was no technology–not even projectors–in my classes growing up. As such, I also never took a computer class.
I first began using a computer around the same time, but not for the internet. My dad wanted to be a writer and he showed me how to access Word on our family desktop. I began writing small stories, because I wanted to be just like him. I always had crazy stories to tell. I felt grateful to have a computer to type on so that my stories looked neat and everyone could read them. The hobby of writing lessened as school became more rigorous and as I found other hobbies.
My mom reserved my gmail account name just weeks after it was first released. She foretold that usernames would run out quickly and some would be more desirable than others, so she procured my name so that when I became a true adult in the workforce I wouldn’t have something difficult to spell or an account with unnecessary nicknames or numbers. To this day I am grateful for my personal email address since it can be understood by everyone and isn’t embarrassing.
Growing up, technology was mostly present in my home and not in my community. Restaurants started using online reservation tools when I returned from my first year of college. There were only a handful of coffee shops with wifi in high school. The exception would probably be technology used in natural disasters–everyone I knew had a generator for a hurricane, and the process of evacuation was when the vast amount of cars owned by Louisiana citizens became most glaring. Similarly, there of course were also traffic lights and the occasional bus–but even our school zones and pedestrian crossings were simple signs without lights.
When I got to college, I saw more technology, but not by much. My classes were still taught analog except for my music technology class. I performed poorly in the class, but I do know how to cut a .wav file in the program Ableton. If you count instruments as a form of technology (I think they should be, because they took engineering skills to create and refine, and you have to be skilled in their “coding” language to make proper use of them) then I also would be considered proficient in the harp and piano. I didn’t have a car on campus, so my experience those years were limited to my dorm room and classes. The electronic keyboard inside the music tech lab was the most advanced technology that I used in all four years of college, with a laptop for writing papers coming in second.
My teachers in school didn’t use technology in the classroom. This has definitely impacted how I use technology. They didn’t have access to a projector; therefore, I use mine exclusively to play a funny video when the kids are not staying in their seats. My classrooms had mechanical pencil sharpeners, and when I have to sharpen my backup pencils, I head to a colleague’s room to borrow theirs. My teachers lacked smartboards, digital tools, TVs, remote controls, game functions, and the like. The tools provided by admin at Jim Bridger feel completely foreign to me–tools that I didn’t even experience on the other side. I don’t even know how to turn on my smartboard, and if I didn’t have to use Canvas and Infinite Campus for grades, I probably wouldn’t have logged in to the computer the school gave us once.
To address the common challenges of integrating technology, I can only speak to my experience. The biggest obstacle I have faced is not being shown the basics that it seems everyone around me already knows how to do. I had to watch a video to find out how to change my email signature. My partner set up my monitors (and taught me that they are different from a computer) when my admin traded our big, boxy computer for a laptop, and also made it so that the monitors would function while the laptop is shut. Whatever they did felt like magic and I still am unsure what steps they took to make my technology more user-friendly. I don’t know how to change the ink in my printer, although someone did show me how to add paper to the copier and how to add staples.
I think I use the bare minimum of technology in my classroom, and thus that the technology that I use is the bare minimum required to teach in a digital age. I am a technophobe, and I don’t foresee the innate nature that I have towards technology shifting to include more in my classroom, even after I learn the skills to use other platforms. I don’t think a projector or smartboard is needed. I don’t even think the students should need a chromebook in the classroom if the school district hadn’t made so many things digital. If I could design my own classroom curriculum, I wouldn’t have any online assignments. I get too frustrated with how many students play video games instead of their assigned task. I think a copier makes a teacher’s life easier, and a printer is fairly crucial, but without these conveniences I still could see myself getting along just fine and exclusively using their workbook without supplementary tools and packets that I make and give to them. The only skills I have found that I had to learn competency with are the ability to use my computer–specifically to type and to correctly access and manage Infinite Campus and Canvas. Everything beyond that I believe to be tailored to a teacher’s preference. Since my preference is an analog classroom as much as I am allowed, I get by without other proficiencies and when a tech problem arises, I call for assistance from the lovely folks hired by my school to assist with technology.
Pretty much every single one of my students are more competent in technology than I am. I regularly tell them that the only trick I know is turning something off and back on again, so if they can’t figure something out about a malfunctioning Chromebook, that I wouldn’t be able to, either. They’re honestly pretty tech-savvy and make their way through most conundrums and the few times that something goes awry that we can’t figure out together, I send them to the technology office for further assistance. Usually that results in them having a new Chromebook, because indeed the problem was advanced.
I hope I don’t sound too hard-headed in regards to the topics we will learn. My experience in education was largely analog, and thus I teach with primarily analog methods. The few times I think to incorporate technology, I get help from someone who does it better than I could. I am excited to learn how to better use technology during this course, but I don’t foresee myself using it in my classroom. So if you were to ask me how I view myself as “being digital” after growing up in a technological society, I would tell you that my technological society was significantly less technical that others my age despite being born before Google, and that I view myself as an anti-digital human who avoids using technology whenever feasible.
Quinn Kendall, Educator 