Can't Teach an Old Teacher New Tech

I am a member of the Language Arts department in my school. There are six other teachers in the department. All of them are female, and all of them are older than I am. In fact, aside from me, I would guess that the youngest is close to forty. The others are all older than my parents. This means they have a lot of teaching experience, and a lot of experience dealing with most other issues at a school. The one area in which I am considered the expert is technology.

They all know how to use email and our online attendance program. Where they have the most trouble is with the assessment tracking an analysis program we have, called Edusoft. Edusoft is a subscriber service that allows teachers to create scanable answer documents for tests, then scan those tests to be corrected and analyze the results in a thousand different ways. Our school has two scanners that can be used with the Edusoft program. One of them is housed in my classroom. So, I have teachers coming in throughout the day to scan their tests.

At first, only one other teacher in my department really knew how to use the program. (I learned at the school I was at last year.) So, each time someone would come in, they would ask me to show them how. And then, by the next time they had something to scan, they would have forgotten what to do, and I would have to show them again. Eventually, they mostly seemed to remember what to do, but still asked an occasional question. For example, one teacher still asks me each and every time she comes in whether the answer documents need to be face up or face down in the scanner tray.

So, it was just the occasional question, and I could keep working on whatever I was doing. Until the computer that the program is on contracted a virus. The tech guys from the district office came to clear it up, but the scanning program still is having issues. I have figured out the little tricks to make it work. I've explained my strategies to the other teachers, but they cannot seem to remember them, and each time it won't scan, they ask me what to do.

So, one day last week, I was showing one of the ladies again how to turn it off, switch off the scanner, turn the computer back on, switch the scanner back on and wait for the two to connect. When we turned the scanner back on, it started printing. There had been a print job pending, and the computer had been waiting to send it. We looked at it when it printed out, and it was the results of a test that one of the other Language Arts teachers had scanned. Then, it started printing again, it was another copy of the same results. We figured that when it hadn't printed out the first time, she must have hit print again. Then again... and again... and again... twenty-one times! Twenty-one copies of the exact same two-page results printed out!

I am no computer genius, especially compared to my husband. And I'll admit that in the past, I have probably been guilty of hitting print again if it didn't work the first time. Maybe someone who wasn't used to working with computers would think that doing it one or two more times might make it work even if it didn't the first two times. But twenty-one times! It didn't work at all the first twenty times, but apparently she thought, "Well maybe if I click on this picture of a printer again..."