You are Never Alone

I’m not sure whether I mean “fractioned” or “fractured” here. But you know the sort of thing that I mean.

Today I was playing with some colleagues on a web-based whiteboard at http://www.skrbl.com/. I was able to set up an account and then invite people by email to join me. OK I had 20 mins or so spare to play and managed to work most things out and yes, I can see a usefulness for this tool. Could even be a useful add on to edna Groups. It is in beta mode at the moment, and doesn’t seem to have an “erase all” facility that I could find, so that was a drawback.

But my point here is that I had the time to think and the time to play. If I was a teacher in a classroom then my time would be very fractured/fractioned. I was talking by phone to a secondary school teacher the other day who wanted some information. He gave me his home email address saying “I never get time to try anything here”.

I am only too aware that many teachers agree that they are time-poor. They are never short of something to do, and each new web 2.0 tool, for example, that demands their attention is going to take time. So will it save time once they have tried it out? It is more likely that in order to try or use something new, they are going to have to stop doing something else. Well, that’s the real world isn’t it? We constantly prioritise the things that we do, but there are some essentials that must never fall off our list?

But the other thought that occurs to me - is “time poor” a state of mind? Do some of us just shuffle the deck chairs to make room for a new one? In reality for teachers much of the working day is spent in managing students, and that in itself requires time spent in preparation. The result is a teaching day that seems so occupied that nothing else can be fitted in. Online communication such as reading  and writing emails, reading and writing blogs, become “spare time” activities. But does it go beyond time management? Is “I’m time poor” a state of mind? I’m not sure.