I have been a huge advocate of how technology can actually BUILD relationships, where many people feel that it lessens both the quantity and quality of our face-to-face interactions. My experiences through social media actually enhancing my “offline” interactions is something that I spoke about last year at #140Cuse and Dean Shareski has some great posts on “Digital Dualism” (here and here).
Then I saw this video from Google (which has some of my favourite ads ever) and how a teacher used something as simple as Google Forms to learn more about her students. I think about my best teachers, especially at the high school level, and how it was important that I had the opportunity to talk to them as a kid that struggled. I think of how easy it was for me to share things with my teachers face-to-face, yet many students did not have that same comfort level but really needed someone to talk to. The teacher in the video below has shown how you can easily give kids another option to share what’s going on in their life so that we can understand them, especially when they are seemingly struggling and we have no idea why.
If I know anything, whether it is as an administrator, teacher, or simply a human being, everything starts with relationships. If we can’t connect with people, it is hard for us to do anything. If technology can help that, we should be all over it.
