Have a Good Life

Bill Carozza posted on his blog about why educators aren't on Twitter. He gives three good reasons, but the best one is that "Technology is not intuitive for many educators." He says:

It’s not that the current generation of teachers and administrators aren’t smart enough, savvy enough, or not wanting to learn or connect. It’s simply that they haven’t seen that the juice is worth the squeeze. (emphasis in original)

He is talking about Twitter, but his ideas apply to any piece of technology that would help educators be better at their jobs.

Using a hand juicer, but imagine that is a lemon.

When I was a kid, I had a lemon tree in my front yard, and lived close to orange groves.  When we wanted juice from a lemon, we went out and picked one, and then would somehow squeeze it to get the juice. We usually only needed a little bit of juice, and so just using a small hand squeezer worked well enough for us.

Oranges were a different story. We would have a couple 50-pound bags of oranges at a time, and we wanted enough orange juice for our family of 7 kids to eat with breakfast. When that kind of task was demanded, we needed to go big! We got out the electric juicer which juiced an orange in about 1 second. We made an assembly line of where one person cut, one person juiced, one person threw away peels, one person kept pitchers close by, and one person cleaned up the spilled juice. We got through those 50-pound bags pretty quickly.

What we need to do when it comes to technology and educators is help them understand how to make the squeeze part of it much more simple. For Bill's daughter (who is 22) the squeeze is nearly natural. For some other educators (even new ones who are also 22), the squeeze is a daunting, unachievable task. It is like using a hand juicer for orange juice for 9 people. Nobody wants to do that. We need to help them use the efficient method of juicing. That will help them want to use it, and enjoy using it. They see the results faster, and there is less stress.

I don't know how to do that, but hopefully my paperless principals posts are helping in some small way.

Have a Good Life.