Like many of you, Ann and I had a pretty quiet Thanksgiving with just the two of us. While we missed seeing our family, it was still quite nice and relaxing. We had a traditional meal; without the stress that comes with entertaining guests! You know, worrying the turkey is going to be too dry, or the pie isn't going to turn out just right. Admittedly I don't have that experience because I don't do the cooking. Plus, Ann really shouldn't be stressed anyway since she is an amazing cook! Nevertheless we had a great day, sitting down for our meal around dinnertime. It was fantastic, and I am sure yours was too!
Earlier that afternoon we managed to participate in a Google Meet with our daughter's family and some of our grandchildren. Although we had some very minor technical difficulties on our end, by in large it went off without a hitch. It was during that call I realized my grandchildren did not live in, and would never know what it was like to make a phone call and not have the option of actually seeing the person you were visiting with. I vaguely remember a couple of unique 'technological' advances from my early years that seem almost laughable by comparison.
For one, I remember my grandparents had a 'party line' phone when I was a youngster. If you don't know what that is, it was sharing a phone line with the neighbors. It would ring a certain way or in a specific pattern if the call was meant for your household. It was also not all that uncommon to go to make a phone call, pick up the receiver to dial and realize the neighbors were on the line talking to someone else! Luckily we were able to have a private line in our own home when I was growing up, which was a pretty big deal if you think about it! The only trouble with this was that we had one phone in our house growing up. It was in the kitchen and offered zero privacy. If I wanted to talk to my friends or the girl that I was dating at that time it was in full earshot of the entire family. I'll bet there are some parents of high school students who would like to see those times again!
When I was still pretty little, probably not even in school yet or just approaching kindergarten, we got our first color television. Oh what an improvement over the old black and white pictures! I can still remember advertisements with the NBC peacock proclaiming the broadcast was 'in living color'. Later on when I went off to college I purchased a color TV (I want to say it had about a 28 inch screen?) for several hundred dollars. If I remember correctly it weighed a ton! Nowadays you can get a 55 inch TV for a couple hundred bucks; less if you time it right and look for the Black Friday deals.
Anyway, as a wee lad I can also recall watching the Jetsons. A cartoon that followed the life of George Jetson who worked for a dude named Cosmo Spacely at Spacely Sprockets. He lived with his family in a future of flying cars, robotic maids, and yes; even phone calls where you could see the person that you were talking with on what appeared to be some sort of computer screen. Fantastical in those days for sure. But now? Not so much. I wouldn't be too surprised to see flying cars at some point.
These days the speed of change seems, shall we say supersonic? Part of this has been forced on us by the pandemic. I'll talk more about how different some of our approaches are in an upcoming post. But I'll do so with particular attention to how far we have come technologically since March: in just eight months! But how we got to this point is, frankly no less remarkable.
This fall we refreshed our computer fleet for the third time. I remember the board approaching the concept of a connected learning initiative with some, while I wouldn't say trepidation I would say concern with the idea that whatever we purchased would soon be outdated. Valid point for sure, but at the same time I am not certain we were looking far enough ahead to see the trueness to that point. Or how irrelevant it really was. Particularly when considering the speed of technological advancement juxtaposed with how the market responded by driving the cost of ownership for technology downward.
The work to where we are today really began in 2012 when we installed our first wireless network in the district. The first fleet of computers was rolled out to students in grades 9-12 in January of 2014. Interestingly enough, the popular videoconferencing platform Zoom was released in 2013. It didn't really take off until, you guessed it: March of 2020! I believe we are now in an era of a rapidly changing educational landscape. For better or worse it has been driven by COVID. Because of the work we have done to lay the groundwork, I believe we are well positioned to thrive in this new environment that has largely been forced upon us. Once this is all in our rearview mirror, I will be excited to see how much we have changed!
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