Seven week ago I stared at an empty document screen and tried to analyze my entire relationship with technology. Letting moving pictures augment my proverbial word count, I eloquently summed things up thusly:
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| Image Source: Tenor |
Since then I've been challenged to look at what I recognize as technology, assessed growing classroom use, voiced my moral hang ups about letting technological progress control our economic future, and explored how I could find support for myself and my students in the digital world.
Less than two month is simply not enough time to have changed my technological perspective. I still resent my own overreliance on my devices. If anything, being exposed to so much new information in such a short time has magnified the feeling that technology is overwhelming. My hope it that I will be able to return to the materials I've been speed reading and time and experience will have let these seeds take root and start growing new appreciation. I've experienced this before professionally- the first time someone suggests switching to using positive language while your class of 3 year olds is constantly imploding it feels like an additional demand instead of a beneficial mentality and classroom. management shift.
Educator Bailey Cavender shares similar thoughts in this post for The Educator's Room: "There was just so much being thrown at me, and not enough time to process it all. There was no shortage of strategies that I wanted to try in my own classroom, but halfway through that last day, nothing was sticking. My brain was struggling to keep up, and I felt overwhelmed." More educators share how PD can be successfully implemented to prevent feeling overwhelmed in this discussion.
Advice against teacher burnout often include platitudes like "work smarter, not harder", which I know it theoretically something technology tools are designed to help with. As much as I balked at AI lesson planning (and AI use in general), I am not currently responsible for writing out my own lesson plans. One thing that also comes up frequently as a tool for educators to maintain their own mental health is getting support from your Professional Learning Network (PLN). I've written here about PLNs, but my explorations have been more detached. I have actually put a lot of effort into my in-person PLN in the past year and made it a professional goal to establish more networking contacts in my building, but I have not yet really dug into the online options. My transitional career state makes me feel more apprehensive about pursuing internet contacts where I cannot rely on my face to face conversation and performance skills.
So I'm getting there. As a bonus, my search algorithms are all to happy to suggest edtech content (along with wedding planning tips and stories about book banning). So I'll leave you with this clip from one my favorite cyberpunk fictions, Johnny Mnemonic:
Image Source: Tenor
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