Teaching and Technology During the Covid-19 Shutdowns

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Technology has changed significantly over the past few decades in the world of education. My first bachelor's degree was in educational technology in 2012. I have seen classrooms evolve from no technology used at all, to classes now being conducted 100% online, even for K-12 students. Special Education Teachers had to be very literate with computers. Many new devices were being used that helped students either read, decode, see, hear, etc. and most had some sort of computer element to using the device. Our entire database for writing IEPs was in an online database, and it wasn't necessarily user friendly. An IEP could be 20 or more pages long and for the web app to correctly print the documents, each box would have to be checked correctly, entered correctly, or used correctly.

Teaching during the Covid-19 shutdowns really showed just how much some schools needed to update their technology. Many schools did not have available devices for students and many had very outdated devices. Chromebooks can be a great tool for school, but many were seeing the need to have a full Windows OS depending on the grade level and type of school work being completed. Access to internet was a challenge, as all students did not have access to internet. Moving forward, I'm going to guess that schools will start to make sure that this is less of an issue in the future.  Especially with many classrooms functioning fully on Google Classroom, I would imagine that connectivity is going to be a goal for all homes in the future. 

One issue that I saw becoming a very big problem in schools was the use of social media being used as a tool for bullying. When reading the chapter, I noticed in 7.7 Vahid & Lysecky make a great observation that many people believe the internet to be a "separate world" with little to no consequences (2019). With younger students, this proved to be even worse. The bullying was horrific for some students. The rate at which the information traveled was amazing, as well. Many teachers did not know what to do or how to stop this, either. I think we will see some changes to how social media is allowed to be used in the future in schools, but as of now this is certainly a growing problem. While I have left the field of education, I believe these issues will remain front and center in public schools for years to come. 

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing Technology for All. ZyBooks.

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