My Technology Autobiography-Stu M.

My first memory of technology in elementary school was going to the computer lab once a week. There, I learned how to type correctly and adequately store information on a floppy disk and those colorful Mac computers that were so slow. In late elementary school, my parents also allowed me to create my first AOL messenger profile to message my friends after school; I was so cool with my Bam182182 name.

In college, I used my dad’s Hammy Down HP laptop, which was super slow, and I only ever used it to write or do assignments. It was interesting because some of my older professors were anti-computers and did not want any assignments to be done with them, and others did. College was the first time I had been introduced to Blackboard, and having a one-stop shop for all my assignments and materials was cool. How my different professors designed their Blackboard page was the first time in my life that I really noticed that some adults are more tech-savvy than others and that the gap between the two was drastic.

When I first became a teacher, I was assigned a school-issued laptop, and it was the assumption that we would make our classes as tech-friendly as possible; the only problem was that the students did not have their own laptops, and they really had been taught how to use them for academic purposes. Before COVID-19, I would post items on Schoology, only to hear my students say that they had yet to look at it or needed to know their passwords. There were no clear expectations for students or teachers to properly use the technology successfully; it was not until Covid 19 that students and some teachers were finally comforted with the reality that they needed to adapt themselves and their classes to online resources and platforms.

Teaching online during the pandemic forced me to make my online resources more comprehensive and my Schoology much more user-friendly. I outline our daily activities and link everything we do in class in more of a systematic way. Fast forward several years later, and I am much more comfortable with the delivery of how much more manageable it is for my students, their parents, and my colleagues to locate information. And along the way, I have learned how to do more things on my computer than I ever thought I could before.

Growing up, I was not a video game kid. I remember getting a Nintendo Wii for Christmas one year and only playing it a handful of times. I was not the most tech-savvy kid, but I did know my way around Microsoft Word and PowerPoint—like a boss! I am really hoping to become technologically inclined as a future 21st-century leader, and hopefully, this is the class to do it!