Lovers, Haters, and I Don't Care(ers)

Yesterday educational technology communities on the internet exploded with mixed emotions as Google for Education announced a plethora of new features for educators just in time, or a week late depending on your district, for back to school.

When I read the blog post in the office I literally did a happy dance and ran into my coworkers’ office to share my excitement. Then, I rushed to social media to share with others and see what the buzz was from my PLN. Many shared my excitement, the lovers, and many were unaware or unimpressed since they aren’t GAFE users, the I don’t care(ers). Then, of course, there were the haters, in this case, a vocal group of opponents against one specific new addition to Google Classroom.

Classroom now has an annotation feature that makes it easier for students and teachers to interact with files (Google, Microsoft, images, and pdfs) when using the Classroom mobile app. I’ll be honest with you, when I first heard about this feature, I wasn’t happy. We’ve done so much to move people away from worksheets and towards creativity, this seemed like a step backward. This seemed like we were giving teachers a tool that enabled bad habits. Then the more I thought about it, I realized my personal feelings about this aren’t relevant to a classroom teacher. This feature, whether I like it or not, is here, so as a technology coach, what am I going to do when my teachers ask about it?

At first, I thought about discouraging use of annotations but then I thought about the teachers I work with. As hard as we’ve tried my coworkers and I have yet to find a simple equation editor that’s as fast and convenient as paper and pencil. So maybe this is the answer to that problem. Who know’s what this tool will become, because I doubt Google knew about HyperDoc or Choose Your Own Adventure Forms when they created those tools. Plus, how often does any edtech tool do something we all cringe about and then months later it becomes something amazing. I guess pdfs, just make us quick to judge.

So as we go back to school I feel it’s important for anyone with a stake in this community to remember the following things:

1. It’s not about the tool, it’s about what we do with it.
2. What may be a substitution to us, may be someone’s gateway into educational technology.
3. Every decision we make in our classrooms is dependent on pedagogy, content, and context, things that vary for every teacher so who are we judge individual decisions?

So what will I say when a teacher asks me about annotations via the Classroom mobile app? The same thing I always say when a teacher asks me about a tech tool. “What’s your instructional objective?” Tools aren’t objectives, but if Classroom annotations supports their objective then who am I to say no to the use of an appropriate tool? It’s our job as power users to help teachers embrace new ideas or tools and ultimately push them outside of their comfort zone and towards innovate in their classrooms.