It’s been a while since I’ve written about any work pertaining to Kiku or Ed/Ed-tech in general. Added responsibilities beside, there’s been a fairly steep decline in my motivation to keep up the same level of insane productivity at work. There are a few reasons for this.
1. A lack of cohesive, actionable feedback.
I’m generally left alone to do whatever it is that I need to do and I’m privileged enough to have the freedom to do so. Thus, I’m more or less a free floating agent. Fellow educators are not inclined to give me honest feedback, partially out of apprehension, a little bit of laziness and in large parts because they are inundated with absolute bottom of the barrel caretaking grunt work. Essentially glorified baby sitters.
2. No immediate success metrics.
Considering I don’t measure my students’ progress via tests, It’s difficult for me to gauge if what I am doing is working, if there’s any effect or if something needs to change.
3. Unclear goals
my project with Kiku has hit an impasse. I used to use it in class actively myself, but with the inception and creation of my school’s digital lesson repo I’ve stopped working on Kiku. Frankly speaking, the workload was unsustainable and without a clear goal, I just… had to take a break.
Anyway, so all these things have prompted me to get that Master’s degree I had thought of a while ago, and finally apply for. So yours truly has matriculated into UBC’s EdTech program! Hurrah!
I’ve also joined JALT (Japan Association for Language Teaching) and enlisted myself into a couple of local chapters. One in particular is JALT CALL, or computer assisted language teaching and that’s also very exciting.
There’s a lot on the horizon.
