Technology is a gift to mankind. It makes so many things possible in the blink of an eye. It lets us teach things that we’ve never dreamt of teaching before and gives us limitless possibilities as far as working with students goes. It seems to be the salvation of modern schools, packed up into one neat little box. It does so many things for us that we are eternally grateful for it’s help, until it breaks. At that moment this tool turns from the most treasured piece of our classrooms in to a piece of junk.
     Most of the teachers I have come across have a rudimentary knowledge of at least how to use the computer. In this district it is necessary at the least to know how to get on the Internet and take daily attendance. Even the least educated know how to do this, but truthfully there are some people who stop there. Email is something that needs to be looked at each day as well, but there are people in the building who haven’t checked theirs in years. They’ve missed all the announcements and counseling sheets not to mention tons of other important things.
     Those two groups aside there are people in the building who use their computers for a number of things every day. I have the pleasure of administrating one of the labs in the building and it is constantly in use by the teachers who are technologically educated. They do searches, conferencing, have their students type papers and send them email. There are a number of different software packages the teachers also make use of to enhance their students educational opportunities.
     This is all a great way to go about teaching until something happens, like it has a tendency to do with technology, and you hit a brick wall. One of the most common problems for a district is when the servers go down. In Kalamazoo the servers are remote which is good in some ways and bad in others. It’s good because we can tell people that there is nothing that we can directly do about the problem because it has to be taken care of downtown. It’s also bad in this way because there is nothing that we can do. I am a very proactive person and if there is something that I can do to fix a problem, I will do it without any question. In cases like this, I feel like my hands are tied.
     There are always problems in the building that can be fixed. Students are always discovering something new and distracting that they can do if they are given the chance. The favorites this semester have been setting the mouse pointers to be all sorts of different objects from an ear of corn to Britney Spears. Lately I’ve been seeing shimmering text, cursors that wrap around the screen and resolutions that are so small you can barley even read what the names of the applications are on the desktop. These are all easy things to fix for someone who knows how, but a majority of the teachers have not been trained to handle them so people like myself get called to make repairs.