Being Inspired by the willingness to try something new

In my day to day job duties, I often walk the buildings I work in talking with teachers about their existing technology.  Quite often, teachers tend to tell me what is wrong or not working.  I don't blame them, actually, I encourage that.  I want to know when something isn't working...I guess because I am a problem solver, or fixer.  As I walked around today, I came across a teacher with a different approach.

This conversation started out the same as the many others I had during this particular walk.  She started to tell me how difficult it was to have students use the laptops we had because they were not allowing students to save to the network.  We've been having this problem ever since we purchased these macbooks and updated them to the newest OS (We never updated the scripts in binding them to the network).  Anyway, back to the story...she also told me how her students couldn't type their entire stories in one sitting and since they had no way of saving, she was not sure how they would "publish" their writing.

So here I was...many ideas racing in my head, you know, since I'm a problem solver.  The first idea that popped out involved using Google Docs.  Since students could access the internet from any laptop we had, they could then create and write their stories in google, which saves automatically.  My ideas kept spewing.  Students could also partner with "writing buddies" to provide feedback in the form of "comments" and the teacher could set up a google classroom so that her students could submit their writing to her...again for feedback.

Now,  as I was saying all this, I was trying to read the expression of this teacher.  Was she going to accept my suggestions and "try" this idea?  Was she going to tell me 15 different reasons why it wouldn't work?  Was she going to just tell me that she was going to give up and just have her students do their writing like they always had done before?  Nope.  Not this teacher.

To my amazement and glee, this teacher was so happy and excited to be trying something new that we talked for another 10 minutes discussing how we could get the ball rolling on this new idea.  Embracing challenges like trying something new could be difficult because in many ways, it can be scary.  This teacher, like many we have in my district knows the importance of trying something new and embracing this "brave new world" of technology.

It inspired me today to work with this teacher and the many others that I get to work with on a daily basis.  I wrote a previous post on the difference between doing things that we "have to do", and doing things we "get to do".  Today, I got to briefly work with an inspiring teacher.  I'm so glad that I get to do these kinds of things.


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