New Technologies
I was the assistant to the principal at a public
high school in one of San Diego’s school districts when the district started
using Outlook calendar to schedule meetings.
My principal used a calendar which she carried around with her penciling
in appointments as she made them. As her
assistant, I got calls from the superintendent and other officials from central
office, as well as parents and community members wanting to schedule meetings
with her. If she wasn’t in her office, I
had to try to decipher her writing in her calendar to see if she was
available. If she wasn’t on campus, I
had to go through a lot of extra steps to try and facilitate these
meetings. If this principal had used the
calendaring convenience of Outlook, other district employees would have been
able to view her availability and it would have made scheduling meetings with
multiple parties so much simpler. They
would have sent her a calendar invitation which she could choose to accept or
reject. She could also have given me
calendar rights so I could accept and/or view her calendar and act as her
intermediary in these cases that came up a lot.
This principal remained adamant about not using Outlook calendar for the
entire three years I worked with her.
Based on Keller’s ARC, I think this principal was not motivated to
change from her comfortable archaic method of calendaring her
appointments. She saw no need to change,
and did not perceive my suggestions as important or relevant. I also think she lacked confidence in her technological
skills and was hesitant to give up her pencil and paper calendar because of
that.
I was not an adult education computer applications
instructor at the time, or I may have been more patient and used different
tactics to try and persuade her. I do
believe she was one of the principals who was forced by her superiors in the
district office to begin using Outlook calendar after I no longer worked
there. If I was working there then, I
would have worked with her to show her how simple the program was to use, and
let her see firsthand the relevancy of it.
I think if she had used it with me as support, she would have developed
confidence in how efficiently the system worked. She would have been able to see how much
easier it made her work day, and with all her other responsibilities,
delegating keeping her calendar to her assistant would have given her more time
for other priorities.
The way I presented Outlook calendar to her
obviously did not capture her attention nor “stimulate lasting curiosity”
(Driscoll, 2005, p. 339), but I could have done that by offering an after-school
class to teach her and the other administrators how to use the program, then
let them practice scheduling meetings on each other’s calendars and mine over a
period of a few days or weeks. This
would have given them an opportunity to see the relevance of the program, and
also given them opportunities to develop confidence using it. I loved Outlook calendar when I was trying to
keep track of appointments as a school district employee, so I feel confident had
I known then what I know now and approached the subject differently, the result
would have been not only the principal but her assistants and administrative
staff all coming on board with using it to complete satisfaction!
Reference
Driscoll, M.P. (2005). Psychology
of learning for instruction. Pearson: Boston, MA
