Work analysis for the 2020/21 school year

Another year has gone by. Another fairly different year. And even if COVID hadn’t hit, things would still be trending the wrong way. Administration is eating up my time and it shows in the lack of development and work on my assignment as an IT educator. I’m a bit at the end of the road when it comes to being able to make myself more efficient while at the same time keeping development and pedagogical work and educational projects going. I simply can’t do it. The question is whether my competence is really used where it makes a difference.

This year is probably also the first year where I’ve shut down more pedagogical projects and sites than I’ve created — and more projects will be closed down, such as Kursportalen. Some of these projects I will, however, continue to run privately, because what I enjoy is learning and creating with digital tools. So how did the year look? Let’s take a little look.

Worked time during the year

I logged just over 19.75 hours of overtime. Below you can see which tasks I’ve worked on. However, a bunch of administrative tasks that I’ve had to cover this year are not shown.

Administration at the expense of pedagogical projects and pedagogical work

The biggest difference in what I’ve spent time on in recent years is that administration is going up. I’ve streamlined and taken on more tasks and still managed to keep it at a reasonable level around 25% of my working time.
The year before last I was also given the job of being responsible for, scheduling and administrating the school’s 43 mother tongues, which is like running another school administratively on the side, just with fewer students. I underestimated the amount of time that would take and you can see that in the chart above.
Unfortunately we’ve also had some sick leaves in the administrative area, and I’ve taken over their tasks as well. To manage the previous administrative tasks as well as the new ones, something had to give. And unfortunately that’s how these types of tasks work: they’re very easy to measure, mandatory, and it’s immediately obvious if you haven’t done them. Administration is mostly checklists that need to be ticked off and I’d also say that a large part of school administration rarely benefits the student directly.

Pedagogical work, pedagogical projects, development and similar tasks, which I consider the core of my assignment, are not as easy to measure and are also not mandatory.

The closer to the student I get, the less valuable it is, because it’s not as easy to measure.

There’s room here to find new processes to follow up and evaluate. But that also requires time. Which I don’t have. :)

But pedagogical work has gone up this past year? Isn’t that good?

Yes, of course it’s good, but much of that time went to COVID preparations and work around remote teaching. So the numbers don’t tell the whole truth. 14.7% is still quite a drop from 33%, which is where I had worked my way up to.

How have the other tasks gone?

Support has gone straight down to record low levels, but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that I took charge of it properly when COVID hit in VT20, which you can see above at the peak in VT20. A lot of material was created in the form of quick guides and video tutorials. Something that has also increased is both media production and web, which go hand in hand. Bigger meetings, in-service training, graduations and similar events have created a much greater demand, especially for video.
I’ve experimented a lot with digital meeting setups and turned my office into a video studio, where I painted half a wall with green screen paint.

In the video above you can see my office with the accompanying video studio, where we’ve done maaaany meetings and other things during the year.
When it comes to the web, we have a comprehensive ecosystem of our own sites for communication, video, books and more. It was also very fortunate when Schrems II hit, as we could continue working as we had before since we only store data in Sweden. Meetings and visits are something that have obviously gone down and if I hadn’t had to be involved and run a lot of meetings digitally, those figures would probably have been down to a couple of percent. Compare that to HT17, where it’s up around 27%.

Personal development and personal projects

Another thing that has had to give is my own professional development. Over the last three terms it has been non-existent, which feels sad. My goal has been to at least keep it around 10%, since that type of development in me is what I can transfer to the organisation. Most of my professional development has therefore been done in my spare time and my focus is still on continuing to develop my coding and to build good and useless little services and projects.

Focus areas 20/21

What I’ve focused on this school year:

Digital basic competence for students, with introductory sessions and continuous development
Keeping my head above water
Decommissioning the blog platform, to later resurrect it again
Collecting, fixing, analyzing, restructuring, following up and generally redoing students’ IT hygiene
Digital meetings
COVID-secure digital communication and teaching
Lärporten - a subject portal for teachers, where they can create and refine teaching materials
Analysis and follow-up of Skolplattformen from the staff perspective
Larger exchange of web servers
End-of-year films

Finally then, has anything been good?

Oh yes, of course! It always is. I work at a lovely workplace with wonderful colleagues. That should never be underestimated. And I know there are more of us who this year have felt stuck wanting to do so much more, but without the time. Maybe I’ve been a bit more tired this year? Maybe VT20 hit harder than I thought with a tough period of double work with both the school and voluntary work with Skolahemma, where there were some 70-hour weeks. A lot, and a different period in my life. Now it’s time to wrap up this school year and move on. In two weeks I’m planning to go on vacation and recharge my batteries. I hope you do too! Until then, a happy summer to you! And to me! :)

Work analysis for the 2020/21 school year - It doesn't look good