I am a leader in a Secondary College and take my role very seriously. When I make decisions or implement new programs it comes after much research and extensive consultation. I take this course because as a leader of a group of professionals i feel it is my duty to provide my staff with the best resources, ideas and processes available. As a result I maintain the respect of my colleagues and know that I have done my utmost to provide teachers with the tools they need to provide a high quality, authentic education. Similarly, I am diligent in staying in touch with new innovations in web tools. There is little I enjoy more than showing teachers and students new web tools that will make their work easier and more effective.
The statements above make up a part of why I consider myself a leader. While my decisions and directions may not always be right, despite my thorough research, I always attempt to do my best for teachers and students.
Therefore I ask, can I consider mysellf to be a good leader if I am promoting tools that I know to be sub-standard.
This post is not to discuss whether or not the Ultranet is an adequate tool or not. It is not. Anyone who has any experience with the brilliant Web tools available knows this to be true. The question is, do Victorian teachers engage in it regardless of its many limitations.
As mentioned, I research the tools that I engage in and promote to others. This has been the case for the Ultranet. I have used it and am a lead user. I find it terribly clumsy and unintuitive. It is my strong opinion that secondary students will be highly reluctant to engage with the Ultranet. Secondary students are heavy web users. They know how tools are supposed to work and have little tolerance for things that don't work. I have researched further than my own experiences.
A major source of information on the Ultranet comes from Twitter, following the ultranet hashtag. Viewing this conversation you see that the major theme is the multitude of things that either don't work at all or don't work properly. Amongst these tweets are an equal mix of complicated fixes for the problems and suggestions to log it with the help desk. There are also the disturbing tweet series of someone sharing the work they have achieved. This work has clearly taken far longer than it should as the tweeter explains the processes. The disturbing part often comes soon after when they tweet they have lost their work or no longer have access to that section of their page. I find it disturbing because I am soon to be asking my staff to invest inordinate time working on this tool I know to be inadequate.
There are of course postive tweets. Most of which come from Ultranet coaches. If the ultranet coaches are well versed in the ways of the web, which I assume would have been a requirement for the role, they must feel terribly conflicted.
Other positive tweets come from some very admirable, hard working teachers. However, even though their achievements seem herculean due to the processes required to achieve them, I always think how the same thing could have been done using another tool in just minutes and with a better result. It also saddens me to think of what they could achieve if not lumbered with the ungainly ultranet.
Another source of feedback on the ultranet comes from speaking to others at the coalface. I have not spoken to one single secondary teacher who believes that the ultranet is a postive thing for our profession. Many agree that the idea is sound, as I do, but can not overlook the inadequacies.
So I ask again, with my opinion clearly that the ultranet is not good enough for students or teachers, can I be a good leader while promoting this tool. I do not believe so.
Already the ultranet is taking away the good will for technology that members within my school have built over many years. Each time I organise for my staff to be PD'd on the ultranet I see more credibility erode. This too will happen when we ask students to engage in the ultranet. It will reaffirm their belief that there is a huge gap between us in our use of the web.
Can I be a good leader and promote bad tools? Can I say I only want the best for my students and then ask them to use poor technology when good is at hand? Is it time teachers made a stand or do we all go along for the sake of politics at the expence of our students?
2 weeks ago
