I spent much of my weekend at the coast upgrading my computer to Windows 8 and doing other computer things for mum and others. A long and involved process interspersed with trips to swim in the ocean and meeting people for breakfast. It’s OK for me to leave the computer running and come back to it later because I have experience. I can only imagine the angst less IT savvy people would have upgrading with every question, moving further away from what they know and are comfortable with and that works. It is interesting, and important to understand; the things I take for granted that people with fewer IT skills get stressed about and don’t understand, this is part of the problem when trying to set up a system for schools. Not only do a number of parents have low IT skills but many of the teachers do not have the skills to understand and solve basic IT problems. Some of the questions I get from friends and family, because I am the “expert” (that just means I know a bit more than them), are: I bought this new computer but I just want to type a word document, my word document won’t open or where is my email button; and, I can’t print (this is the bane of my existence because every printer is different and I don’t have a solution, except send it digitally so some else can print it for you) .
Getting the understanding between an operating system and a program across to average people is not the easiest concept. The expectation that when you buy a computer it will be able to do the things that you can do on the previous one or the one at work; but that’s not the way it is. When my mum purchased a laptop she didn’t understand (and I don’t think she still does) that you have to get another program so you can access your mail and write your letters. I did an experiment, I know it’s not nice to experiment on your parents, and I installed Open Office and Mozilla Firefox software and set it up so that it automatically saves and opens in the programs, she has experienced upgrades before so she has taken a little to get used to it, but it seems to be working for her. The moral is, if your program (or app) does what the user wants they will use it, the problem is having the skills to set these things up and move documents between different applications.
This is one of the problems at schools – home has platform X, school has platforms X, Y and Z, the student brings the work they have done at home into school and it won’t open, or it just doesn’t look as good as it did at home, this is not engaging for the average student and they are less likely to put the time in next time. It is important for parents, and students to learn how to save their hard earned work to a format that can be opened on a number of platforms, the more I think about it the options are: to bring your own device to ensure that you can present (and hope we have the connectors), save it as a .pdf file for presentation, or to save work to a web app and open it from the internet (most classes have that) and if they have saved it to the cloud in the first place there is less chance of them losing it. Although I now have 6 cloud storage places and need to start to think about what I store on each, but this is no different than my 6 USB’s or my many folders with thousands of pieces of paper – data storage, organisation and retrieval.
This wasn’t exactly what I wanted to blog about today, but still relevant problems and ones that in the world of digital devices in education need to be addressed; especially, how do we get parents of our students to be comfortable with the technology to be able to assist/ support their students. I had this conversation with a parent the other day, after the conversation I thought I had converted him to the benefits of students being able to use multiple platforms, only to find that he had been having a heated discussion with one of my staff about why we don't just have one platform. The issue would be less if the teachers and parents had the skill and know how to help the students, this sounds like a vicious cycle.
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