I Adapted To Technology Late In My Career. Here’s How It Helped Me

Silver Talkies Club member Lalitha Desikan tells us how adapting to technology gradually helped her continue in her career.

When I sit back to reflect on technology and its impact on my life, I can’t help but go back 18-20 years to the time my husband decided to buy a desktop.

I remember being totally against the idea and even argued it was a wasteful expenditure! To me trying to use it was a complicated and time-consuming activity and life was quite productive without this space-occupying monstrosity ( Computers were much larger those days). The other reason I was put off was that in my enthusiasm to be equipped with the need of the times, I had joined a programming course a couple of years earlier and somehow never managed to understand programming and COBOL and FORTRAN.

Today we have a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and two smartphones at home and I feel handicapped when even one does not work! I must credit this change in attitude to a large extent to my job. Let me tell you why.

In my role as a Principal, I needed to be constantly sending and receiving emails even when at home. Some of them would come at a short notice and could have been a costly miss. Secondly, as a school, we decided that the school must go digital and both teachers and children needed to be equipped to face the digital world.

And so classrooms were fitted with smart boards. But for the not-so ‘smart’ and rigid minds like me, the Smartboards with their seemingly magical prowess were quite a challenge. To give the teachers their due, they took to it with ease and excitement – even the senior teachers who initially resisted the change. It then became imperative that I be as knowledgeable as them when they presented a lesson. It’s true I was not teaching and didn’t need to be as proficient in the use of the many features Smartboards had but I needed to be aware so that I could suggest options when I interacted with them.

And then came the pandemic!

Even as I told the teaching staff that all of them needed to go online and ensure that the teaching and learning process did not suffer, there was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had grown up with the chalk and talk method and I had taught in the same way. I thought online learning was unfair to both the teachers and students. How on earth was learning going to happen in the absence of eye contact? But I was glad to be proven wrong! a year down the road I cannot thank technology enough for ensuring that learning did not come to a standstill. I learnt Zoom along with the teachers to use for teaching. And later when we shifted to another learning platform, we learnt that too. Today I don’t get that uncomfortable feeling when I hear terms like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.

Even today I know I don’t know as much as my teachers do. Why, only yesterday one of the teachers told me that I could read individual student responses on a ‘Padlet’ that she has created; while another teacher said that she has created a Zoom board for the same. So there is more to learn; more to explore.

I know I had to undergo a huge change in my attitude to technology; I also know if I had not changed my attitude and equipped myself with the necessary skills, I might have had to retire from a very satisfying job that I have. In order to stay relevant at work, I had to change my thinking from ‘not necessary’ to ‘a necessary evil’ to ‘Thank God for the ever-evolving technology. Whether it is a boon or a bane (and yes I believe that misuse could make it a bane ), without this amazing leap in science where would society be?