Can Apps Help with Teaching?

For an assignment for the teacher program at Rio Salado, I went to EducationWorld.com and hunted around for articles about classroom management. I read a few articles of sage advice --mostly those that were comprised of common sense or those offering advice I already knew-- but I was mentally hung up with an article titled, "Five Incredible Apps for Classroom Organization". If you'd like to view it, you can follow the link here: http://www.educationworld.com/five-incredible-apps-classroom-organization

This concept is fascinating to me. Most of them offer tools for helping take attendance, a proactive to-do list of things to prep for regarding upcoming lesson plans, a retroactive to-do list of assignments that need to be graded, databases to keep track of behavior problems, gradebooks, etc., and the paid versions of these offer you the ability to print these documents, to give them to parents or to keep. These apps are full of bells and whistles, one more thing for the teacher to learn and adjust to.

I'm wondering if my school is unique in that I have most of these tools available to me already. I do know that my school is unique in that it issues Surface Pro 3 tablets with Windows 10 to all of the teachers (and if you happen to lose your stylus in the airport on your way home from summer vacation, it's up to you to replace it. I mean, that's never happened). My classroom is one of the few classrooms that has a desktop computer left in it, too, meaning that I can choose to take attendance on Schoolmaster either on my tablet or on the desktop. I can choose to keep my Schoolmaster gradebook either through the tablet or through the desktop. I can choose to access Moodle either on my tablet or my desktop, and by the way, Moodle offers students the ability to submit their essays and assignments digitally with a timestamp if they turn in their work late. Once I download all of those essays onto my tablet, I can read them each in OneNote, thus leaving comments on the draft with the aforementioned stylus just like I would hand-write on an essay. To get the essays back to the students, I upload everything back onto Moodle as a feedback comment file to the file they submitted.

This is just the technology that I utilize on a regular basis --because, let's be honest here, that's about all the new technology learning I can handle in this busy season of life. Because all of this work on Moodle isn't the only work: for the two Dual Enrollment courses I teach (ENG101/ENG102) and the college novel writing course I teach, I use Canvas as the Learning Management System with different systems for file uploads. And, yes, Canvas has its own bells and whistles, including Panopto recordings for recording audio and visual lectures (which I do in the Springs when my college courses are online only), there is something called TurnItIn! that scans essays for plagiarism, and there's an ability I haven't utilized yet regarding auto graders. In fact, I went to a 8-hour-long professional development last week that focused quite a bit of time on auto graders and about how I really should be using them at the high school (with the college's technology) because auto graders are what the PSATs and SATs and ACTs and AZMerit's all use to grade those essays. Additionally, more and more colleges use auto graders for college entrance essays, using something like these algorithms to judge syntax, word choice, sentence length, sentence variety, and determinations of poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation. If my kids are going to be held to these standards once they get into college, isn't my job to get them ready for that? So how do I manage to find time to test out the auto grader when I'm teaching full-time at the high school, part-time at the college, and when I'm going to school in what feels like full time what with the technological problems I experience there?

I suppose this is the conundrum for which there is no answer: how is it that teachers can find more time to be human? And isn't that what these apps are selling us --the idea of having more time? (Note the absence of the word "promise" as no one can promise that --just present an idea.) Any app or program with bells and whistles promises more time only "after you get used to it", the ever-present disclaimer that the learning curve will present a time-sucker of its own.

For instance, since the teachers and students alike have been issued tablets at my school with Windows 10 (though the student tablets aren't as nice as our Surface Pro 3s), the sophomore English teacher requires all students to turn in their written assignments through OneNote. She says in one notebook, there is a tab for each name and as each student works on his/her work, the work automatically shows up. From there, she can grade directly onto OneNote, and the file is updated on their device in their OneNote. Would this save me time? Hell, yes. This weeds out all of the time spent downloading and uploading (which when you have close to 115 students is quite a chunk of time on its own), but this also presents time-suckers in other ways. The sophomores complain it takes them so long to get OneNote set up. They don't like it and can never get their bewitched machine to work as it should. I find, then, that the time-sucking is spent in getting everyone settled and then in excuses. I haven't compromised for two reasons: 1) Colleges don't use OneNote. They do as I do in downloading and uploading, and I would rather get them used to a simple, college-like policy. 2) If I'm going to have a time-sucker, I would rather it was in downloading and uploading rather than in whining. Maybe that makes me a whimp. No. No, it doesn't: I'm the no late work, no extra credit teacher, so I already hear whining. That doesn't make me a whimp: that makes me sick of excuses and I'm happy to eliminate one more possibility of hearing them.

It's amazing to me that on teacher evaluations (ones I've seen from the three different high schools and colleges I've worked at) teachers are still evaluated on their use of technology. How could we not use it? At the very least, if I did nothing else I would have to take attendance on the computer. But there really aren't protected places for Luddites anymore. My predecessor in Dual Enrollment required everything to be turned in by paper and then made plenty of the obligatory jokes about killing trees. Who has the back to carry all of that? (I don't.) Who wants the risk of spilling coffee (or, heaven forbid, wine) on student essays? (I've never spilled wine on essays before. Hah.) But more than that, is there any value in these romanticized notions of teaching English when almost every single college uses Blackboard or Canvas and requires students to turn in assignments digitally?

We live in a new world, which means lots of bright, flashy, distracting tools for teachers. We have to be careful about which time-suckers we select, and we have to be okay with abandoning these features if they don't suit us entirely as our needs demand. After all, if they don't, there will be another one right along that claims to meet our needs.

In closing, I wonder if apps really can help us manage a classroom. There's something about the chemistry of a class --those specific bodies in those specific chairs for a set amount of time-- and no app can tell us how to manage them. Apps are great, but they're not all they're promised to be.