The interview process for the Oral History project went pretty smoothly. For the project, I chose to interview my mom on her own experiences with computers, certain technologies that work with them, and how they are used for educational purposes. My mom is an eighth grade teacher and just off of my personal experience, I wanted to learn more about her own uses with computers because in this day and age, different types of technology in classrooms is always changing.

During the actual interview, I had a list of around fifteen questions that I had wanted to ask my mom so there was not as much conversation flow as I would have liked during the rough-cut interview, however we did talk after the interview in more of a conversational way about her students and different technologies specifically.

One thing that surprised me quite a bit during our interview was learning how much the technologies have changed since I was in school. I remember being in middle school and teachers had to sign up to reserve the computer lab for a work day and the teachers had to plan their schedules around whether or not they got the lab that day. I learned that teachers no longer have to really schedule when they want to use the computer lab because every student now has their own Chromebook that they can work on. This is crazy to me, but definitely makes it a lot easier for teachers and it is more convenient.

A very popular theme that was introduced a lot through the interview was how modern-day technology has made teaching so convenient and less time consuming (it is still a very time-consuming profession, don’t get me wrong, but modern technology has helped a lot). My mom had said that with the Google Classroom program, she is able to administer tests to her students and they are able to take them on their Chromebooks. After they complete it, the online tests are automatically graded. This makes it easier for my mom because she does not have to go and hand grade a multiple-choice test.

I had learned in another one of my classes this semester to edit the questions out of the audio, although it is a personal preference. I chose to not include myself asking the questions in the audio because I wanted to blend the responses together to create a short story instead of having it abruptly jump from question to response to new question repeat.