Tag: Technology

EdTech User Experience

Starting with the most basic questions: Do we have enough devices for everyone to access it and do we have sufficient bandwidth so that we can do our work without waiting for the next screen to paint or text to send?

You try to keep a room full of teenagers engaged while they wait for their Chomebooks to paint when they know that their cell phones could have finished the task before their Chromebooks found the wifi connection.

Right now I have been using Realtime for two years and the pain points include not being able to use the tab key to move to the next field while taking attendance, and only being able to navigate down a column of grades and never across a row for a single student.

I never got past the basics on Canvas, and the drama trying to get files posted that students could read on their Chromebooks was my biggest pain point.

Three years of experience make me adept at working through the Google Classroom pain points, but I do wish I could more easily reuse materials from earlier sections. Being able to create a new lesson and assign it to multiple sections is great, but it would be even better if I could add a section after the fact!

Which brings me to my User Experience observation. I have worked in pre- and post- sales support where I was the expert in user experience and liaised between end users, sales people, technicians and code writers. I explained, demonstrated, documented and specified bug fixes, software updates, and new functionality. It turns out that I was exceptional at identifying best practices and explaining across job descriptions what the customer needed, why they needed it, and how it should work. We need to talk!

 

 

Labor Day Reflection

Recently, I was asked to describe my level of familiarity/proficiency with technology.  The answer is an apt Labor Day Reflection:

I thought that I started my relationship with technology the year I sold ISOETEC telephones against AT&T’s Merlin.

The truth is that when I applied to Fashion Institute of Technology I learned that Fashion is a reflection of how we live, and that it is much more than clothes.  The data we collected at the points of order entry, receiving, and sales were part of my education at FIT and my daily responsibilities as an assistant buyer. I discovered that my strength lay in analysis of data and  identifying and developing best practices.

Because I understood the retail end user’s business and could liaise with Tokyo Electric Corporation’s sales and engineering personnel, I went to work for TEC America, Inc. There I worked in pre- and post-sales support conducting training, developing best practices, reporting bugs and writing white papers.

I continued working with technology at Linens ‘N Things as I managed the deployment of AS-400 with IBM Point of Sale, upgrading inventory management, and launching third party Gift Registry and Time Keeping applications. We spent a year specifying functionality and testing updates before rolling out to the chain and continued testing each new iteration before deployment in stores.

At SASI (now owned by SAP) I resumed the duties of  pre- and post-sales support but added to my responsibilities testing and rolling out Y2K hardware and software updates to hundreds of legacy locations. All stores needed to be brought up to date with electronic credit authorization and electronic food stamps (EBT) before Y2K updates could be applied. There were locations that had been running for more than 15 years without ever being updated, so they required hardware upgrades before we could begin software updates. My territory was NYC. The density of locations in NYC combined with our proximity to corporate offices in Bristol, PA meant that mine were the first locations to be upgraded and field tested. Then my peers from around the country came to work with me to be trained in the process.

After Y2K I went to work for my biggest account as an IT Director responsible for integrating front of the house Point-of-Sale systems and back of the house inventory with corporate pricing and vendor item files.

I stepped away to raise a family and then returned to gainful employment focusing on the skills I had developed in customer facing and training roles. It took five years of dogged persistence to successfully complete New Jersey Department of Education’s Alternate Pathways to Teaching but I now hold three standard teaching licenses.

I’ve worked in districts that used PCs, Laptops and Chromebooks,  Remind, SchoolMessenger, Aesop, Engrade, Powerschool and Teachscape. I use an Apple computer at home. I use Word and Excel because that is easier to share with non-Apple system users, although I like Numbers and Pages. I use Google Docs and Google Sheets when sharing is important. I’ve used PowerPoint, Keynote and Slides interchangeably, but lament the lack of tools built into Slides.

Using Chromebooks in the classroom, I have had students use Google Drive, classroom, forms, sheets, slides and draw so far…

Having answered their question, I would like to pose an observation: Technology is a tool. Each job requires the successful completion of certain tasks. Good tools are the ones that facilitate the successful completion of the tasks required by the job. The best tools should be invisible when the job is done.