Yesterday's Magic

Noted science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke made the famous pronouncement that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Over the past couple of days it occurred to me how many times I’ve used some form of “advanced” technology for my classes, and how some of it still seems magic to me, and some not so much. In AP Lit, we spent time in class using Audacity to record some pieces for podcasts, while on my unscheduled hours I was grading essays on GoogleDocs, thus completing our first paperless in-class writing/workshop/grading project. Both podcasting and working on GoogleDocs still have the aura of magic about them for me, through even in the few days I’ve used them, they already have become more familiar and comfortable. I thought to myself, wow, I’m really incorporating technology into my teaching, because in both cases I made a conscious effort to try something new. And then I realized that in the past couple of days I have also: asked my students to blog about their class discussion, carried sound files from one computer to another using a flash drive, used the projectors in both my classroom and the LMC lab to show instructions and examples saved on my file server folder, had my sophomores go online and find an article from one of the subscription services, recorded attendance on Infinite Campus, and, oh yeah, wheeled in a TV/DVD player on a cart when a student’s project wouldn’t play through the classroom computer. This last list seems like anything but magic; it seems like a typical part of what we do. But not long ago (a matter of months, in some cases) these activities would have been pure magic. It makes me thankful that the 21C group has encouraged us to pick up the wand.