A few days ago I was out and about and I needed to talk to someone in my family (why isn't really relevant to this story). They were all also out and about. I first tried calling my wife on her cell phone, but her line went straight to voice mail. I then tried my older daughter. Voice mail again. Then I tried my younger daughter. Ditto.
My first reaction was one of anger. Why are we paying for all of these cell phones, I thought to myself, if no one is going to have the darned things on when I need to get ahold of someone? Later, when I had calmed down a little bit, I realized how ridiculous that thought was. They all had their phones with them, but no one has her phone up against her ear constantly, and in a noisy situation it's easy to not hear your phone.
But that initial reaction did get me thinking. I EXPECTED to be able to communicate with my family instantly. I wanted instant results. And that is so different from just a few years ago. A decade ago, if someone's family were away from home, that person would most likely have just waited for the family to get home to talk to them. Not today. Thanks to cellular technology, he can expect to get ahold of his family at all times.
We live in an age of instant results, and it impacts more than just my expectations about communicating with my family. It also affects the expectations surrounding the technology in schools. Eight years ago, when I was still a classroom teacher, I would estimate the reliability of our district network to have been about 90 percent. Most of the time our network was up and running, but it wasn't uncommon for the Internet to go down for an hour or two once a week. This was especially likely on a Monday morning when the network had just had from Friday afternoon at 4 until Monday morning to croak out for one reason or another.
This was a real problem for me as I had a web design class that was taught as an "Early Bird" class from 7 A.M. until 7:50, but the district technology department didn't get into work until almost eight. It became such a common occurrence, in fact, that I structured my class in such a way that I didn't depend upon the network being up on Monday mornings.
That would never fly today in this era of Instant Results. The Internet is expected to be up. And it usually is. Thanks to a server that my district network admin setup, I found when I ran a report Friday that the WORST reliability any part of our network had was 98.4 percent. And for most of the network our reliability was above 99.5 percent! And that's good, because if the Internet weren't up tomorrow morning at 8 A.M., the district would ALREADY have had the following problems:
It's an era of Instant Communication, an era when communication technologies are EXPECTED to work all the tome. And those expectations don't stop at the door of the school. And the expectations are only going to continue to grow as tome goes on. Teachers are going to want easy access to all of the tools they have at work at home. Students are going to want to be able to bring their personal technology into school and not have to just leave it in their lockers. An d EVERYONE is going to want wireless service that they can connect to without difficulty and they're going to want that wireless access everywhere. It's going to be my job to make sure all of this expectations are met.
Lucky me...
P.S. As I mentioned at the start of this blog entry, I also suffer from an expectation of instant results. I couldn't wait until I was at a computer to write this entry, so I wrote it on my Kindle Fire while sitting at a track meet.
My first reaction was one of anger. Why are we paying for all of these cell phones, I thought to myself, if no one is going to have the darned things on when I need to get ahold of someone? Later, when I had calmed down a little bit, I realized how ridiculous that thought was. They all had their phones with them, but no one has her phone up against her ear constantly, and in a noisy situation it's easy to not hear your phone.
But that initial reaction did get me thinking. I EXPECTED to be able to communicate with my family instantly. I wanted instant results. And that is so different from just a few years ago. A decade ago, if someone's family were away from home, that person would most likely have just waited for the family to get home to talk to them. Not today. Thanks to cellular technology, he can expect to get ahold of his family at all times.
We live in an age of instant results, and it impacts more than just my expectations about communicating with my family. It also affects the expectations surrounding the technology in schools. Eight years ago, when I was still a classroom teacher, I would estimate the reliability of our district network to have been about 90 percent. Most of the time our network was up and running, but it wasn't uncommon for the Internet to go down for an hour or two once a week. This was especially likely on a Monday morning when the network had just had from Friday afternoon at 4 until Monday morning to croak out for one reason or another.
This was a real problem for me as I had a web design class that was taught as an "Early Bird" class from 7 A.M. until 7:50, but the district technology department didn't get into work until almost eight. It became such a common occurrence, in fact, that I structured my class in such a way that I didn't depend upon the network being up on Monday mornings.
That would never fly today in this era of Instant Results. The Internet is expected to be up. And it usually is. Thanks to a server that my district network admin setup, I found when I ran a report Friday that the WORST reliability any part of our network had was 98.4 percent. And for most of the network our reliability was above 99.5 percent! And that's good, because if the Internet weren't up tomorrow morning at 8 A.M., the district would ALREADY have had the following problems:
- The kitchen staff at each school who serve breakfast before the start of school would have been unable to use their cash registers and would have had to write transactions down on paper. This would have slowed the food service down and delayed the start of school. Which probably would have been a good thing because...
- ...We're MAP testing this week (an online, formative assessment) and the test proctors w who get to school early and log into the computers and prepare them for the testing, would not have been able to setup the computers and would have had to delay the start of MAP testing.
- The district runs an alternative school that has an entirely computer based curriculum. Without the Internet, that school would be unable to do ANYTHING. Speaking of which...
- ...That same Internet-based software is used in a credit recovery lab in the morning before school. That lab would have to close for the morning.
- Secretaries in the front offices of the schools would be unable to put into our Student Information System student absences as parents call in to say that a particular student will not be at school today. They'll have to jot it on paper until the system is back up.
- Teachers who wanted to enter some last minute grades into their gradebooks will be unable to do so.
It's an era of Instant Communication, an era when communication technologies are EXPECTED to work all the tome. And those expectations don't stop at the door of the school. And the expectations are only going to continue to grow as tome goes on. Teachers are going to want easy access to all of the tools they have at work at home. Students are going to want to be able to bring their personal technology into school and not have to just leave it in their lockers. An d EVERYONE is going to want wireless service that they can connect to without difficulty and they're going to want that wireless access everywhere. It's going to be my job to make sure all of this expectations are met.
Lucky me...
P.S. As I mentioned at the start of this blog entry, I also suffer from an expectation of instant results. I couldn't wait until I was at a computer to write this entry, so I wrote it on my Kindle Fire while sitting at a track meet.
No comments:
Post a Comment