The Wikiness

Two additional shirts that I hesitate to give away now have only historical value. But I was once so proud of them! They betokened my brand, and two years on, their ego radiance lingers.

For the last thirteen years of my career, the multi-colored embroidery on these polos labeled me as special–the solitary teacher among 7000 for several years in the entire West Suburban Teachers’ Union who had earned the right to wear them. These polos told the world I had the knowledge and commitment to advance a democrat vision of education. How special was that?

Over my left breast, these shirts proclaimed me a “Google Certified Teacher,” but I was basically an unpaid shill for the California search engine that proclaimed it would not “be evil.” These shirts and other swag were a pathetically big part of my payment for several years. And in retrospect they were a long time coming.

In the late 90s, as a “tech-saavy” early adopter, I was the only one in the department to build class websites with HTML. I couldn’t wait for students to email me! In the meantime, I

In 2005, at the urging of my son, I became a fan of the new “Gmail” and the “cloud Drive.” Right away I was leveraging the collaborative, community-building potential of Google Docs , along with Wikispaces and later the Facebook clone Edmodo, into my courses. I was getting good results and the students, or more than half of them anyway, were motivated by the new work modalities. Literacy learning was happening in new ways and I wanted to share it, and so in 2008’s Illinois Association of Teachers of English convention I presented a multi-media presentation of my ideas for high school teachers, “Wiki-Up, young Americans!”

In my school, I emailed and met with my bosses and fellow teachers to get them on board what I was convinced was the vehicle to more better, more efficient and cooperative learning.

“Hey, Becca, wouldn’t you like your kids to be able to collaborate after and before school instead giving them all that class time? These tools I found are your answer!”

“Uh, no Drew. You’re talking about a whole new skill set for me to learn on top of everything else.”

OR

“My old skills work perfectly well, thank you.”

At best, my colleagues gave me patronizing “interesting”s. At worst, professional jealousies were inflamed.

With top administrators, I’d say, “So you see from these projections just how much money and learning time could be saved if we went ahead and accepted the very agreeable terms Google is offering early-adopters. Won’t you work with me to change the culture?”

In return, I got more “interesting!”s and no follow-up.

I endured years in the ed-tech wilderness, and grew accustomed to being the lone voice drowned out by the status quo. No one cared about my heralding a new age of student involvement and engaged learning. 

Fortunately, I could connect online with like-minded innovators, and in 2008, I won an invitation to the new Google Teacher Academy in New York City. The three-day training at the Googleplex in Chelsea brought me together with tech-obsessed teachers from the UK and all across this country. We got indoctrinated into the core belief–that asynchronous collaboration and interactivity were school’s future. 

So impressive to me was the Google Ed worldview that within a year I was designing new schools that relied on wifi and the Cloud Drive. I attempted to sell three different superintendents and school boards to go Google. Alas, it was consistently no dice, even when I wore my GCT polo!

I wore the shirts on days that seemed appropriate, such as student showcases of digital portfolios, or on all-faculty Institute days, when my timid district made baby steps toward connected learning by finally getting a cloud drive–and then did nothing but store curriculum documents on it. Wearing the polo, though, I imagined myself Sir Galahad in righteous armour among the unenlightened, shining forth the Google message like a Holy Grail. 

Perhaps my persistent proselytizing had an effect:  In 2013, my district finally went Gmail, and by 2015, each kid had a Chromebook.  Eventually, other teachers got Google Certified and my role shifted from chief evangelizer to tech assistant number 12.  My ego regretted that my expertise hadn’t been recognized earlier, and the educator in me rued the wasted years for students in other teachers’ classes. But it was gratifying when my colleagues–many grudgingly–began to see the light.

I now recognize that my fixation on leading the way for Google apps in schools had as much to do with my lack of professional esteem as it did with improving education for all.

Hanging idly in my closet now, my GCT polos are the uniform of a veteran whose side won the war, but who personally suffered too many lost battles to easily cast them aside.