Technology certainly has come a long way even within the last couple of years. With the advent of online education during the pandemic, we all had to rev up our skills with technology and apps to meet the demand. No one can appreciate this more than teachers. On very short notice we had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get up to speed to teach our kiddos online out of necessity.  It was dread and chaos for awhile until we all got the hang of it. But we did pull through.

Being in zoom with 25 students reminded me of news reporters on TV. Unless you are the weather person, you never see them below their waist so they would be wearing pajamas for all we know with that nice dress jacket and tie. Being in the zoom crowd for so long I think all of us did some of this. Why dress up all the way when you aren’t going to be seen anyway. GUILTY~!!!

In this age and time, you can go to YouTube and find almost anything at all you would like to see. There are full length lessons there, some running three hours and longer.  It is like a college art lab class for three hours. It’s a good way to get information, be taught new tricks, or just watch a movie right from the comfort of your own home. The same way we taught for a year and a half in zoom over the internet.

Depending on your set-up you can get some pretty expensive and sophisticated equipment for home done videos. For those of us who have always taught face to face, this is something we had to get used to. Everything you do is different. For one thing, you are working in a much smaller work space. The overhead camera is fixed and is not going to follow your every move unless you have one of those fancy cameras that does that. Because that camera is in focus for that area directly under it, you can’t be pushing your paper around or changing its position. That is very difficult not to do when you are used to working that way. It’s very restrictive.

The lighting has to be much better than normal room lights. So, when we were video filming there were lights in front of, above, behind, and even over the camera. Cords going everywhere, you had to be very careful moving about and where you stepped.

All in all, it worked well and we got through many hours of video filming. It was an experience in a realm we all were not used to. Funny how quickly you can adapt!