In defense of a small corner of Facebook

Where’s the first place you go when having a problem in your tech room?

For some it may be putting a call into the help desk. Some schools might have a ticketing system where support may come in a few hours or a few days. Others may have no support at all.

For me I have what some may think is an unlikely resource:

I go to Facebook.

Not just my regular Facebook feed; that’s becoming more filled with ads every day. I go to the #NYCSchoolsTech Facebook page.

Is the internet down throughout the city, or just my room? How do I re-image this laptop? I’m getting a weird message on my smartboard that was working yesterday.

Does anyone have any great lessons to share using Kahoot? Now that Padlet is for fee, what are some alternatives? Does anyone have ideas for a parent engagement activity on digital citizenship?

Anyone know of a job opening? I need to get out of my school!

All these and more are asked and answered on the page. It’s a closed group of over 3000 of the best and brightest New York City has to offer. We are there for each other.

We post about events coming up, try to come up with creative ways to acquire funding for our technology centers, and thank our colleagues for always coming to the rescue.

Nothing beats it for speed and accuracy. If my technology or internet is acting weird, I can go online and see within minutes if others are having the same issue. The Department of Ed help desk even posts updates on issues and how soon it will be fixed. I’m sure that makes their jobs easier too, rather than answering the 50 emails or phone calls they would have gotten asking the same question.

Great ideas for your classroom, how to deal with being the SPOC in the building, it all happens on the Facebook.

You can complain about Facebook if you want, but if you have anything to do with technology in NYC Department of Education, it’s a comfort to know that there are some wonderful people out there who’ve got your back.

My favorite lesson for the end of the year.

What do I do with my students? How do I keep them engaged at this point in the year? I have the solution.

One of my favorite lessons happens around this time of the year. My students open up the time capsule they created in September. In it they answered a bunch of questions, so when they open it in June they see how their answers have changed to those questions.

It's one of my first lessons for the year. It's a quick way to get to know my students, and an easy way to introduce some slideshow tools.

One of the first slides is a Table of Contents listing all sorts of things about the student: their favorite movie, their best friend, how the first few days in a new school went for them. I then teach them to hyperlink those items to the corresponding slides in the presentation.

It's in their google drive for safe keeping, and right around now we open it back up again. Since they're mature, sophisticated, almost 7th graders, the answers they gave as tiny little newbie 6th graders sometimes make them laugh. They create new slides and answer the same questions again, noticing how much they've grown and changed over the course of the year.

It's a good lesson to show them how much they've grown, and to be proud of how far they've come in a year. I'm thinking I should create one for myself, and see how my answers change from the beginning of the year. After all, I should be growing too.