Content Area Objects and Tools

I chose to investigate content area objects and tools because I want to make the best use of my time in this course. If I cannot use it in my classes I find it hard to justify the amount of time required to learn about it. Content defines who you are when you teach at the high school level. If I were not intensely interested in what I teach I would get another job. I love sharing my passion with my career and tech students. I think my excitement must rub off on them because they are often showing me pictures of their culinary experiments at home. 

The first question I asked myself was, "what kinds of intellectual tasks would my students perform that might be better accomplished with the use of technology?" To begin with, technology has been in the commercial restaurant for years and its use has expanded with POS (point of sales) systems that most businesses use today. More than ever before a technology system must be utilized to help food service businesses effectively track orders, inventory items, create schedules, make customer orders, manage (customers and employees), and train. Virtually no hospitality business can operate without one of these systems. By exposing students to how these systems operate while they were still in high school, I would be helping them transition. The kicker is: these systems are tens of thousands of dollars to purchase. Since I teach at a small 3A rural school this is not an option for me. Not to be deterred, I contacted several representatives of these companies: POSitouch, KitchenBrain, and Aloha to find out if a less expensive, pared down version might be available for my school. (I did this last year and hit a brick wall.)

In the meantime, I also checked out some ipad tools that are for system management (just not with commercial applications in mind) - How to Cook Everything, All Recipes Dinner Spinner and Epicurious. I determined that all three would be worth investigating so I downloaded them to take them for a trail run. Epicurious has a nice feature that allows a person to sync recipes from anywhere on the web for free and it also has a voice activated command mode. This is very important to me because of food safety issues and the danger of hands cross contaminating food and equipment. 

How to Cook Everything looked good originally and I loved the graphics, but it has a very limited number of recipes to access (compared to Dinner Spinner, which has about 15 times as many.) Bottom line: I will have to play with them some more to figure out all the applications that I might use them for in class. Off the top of my head, I can see using the tutorial component of How to Cook Everything to demonstrate techniques before heading to the kitchen labs. I can also see using the nutrition feature that Dinner Spinner offers when we analyze recipe ingredients to calculate fat, carbohydrate, and protein percentages. 

If I hear back from a POS sales representative I will post the gist of my conversation with them on this blog. If a system is not available for students to use for free or very low cost I will be back at square one for now...  

The second question I asked was "how does this help me meet the TEKs in my classes?" Certainly a POS system would help me meet the TEKS for Culinary I:

(7) The student uses technology and computer applications to manage food service operations. The student is expected to:

(A) use technology tools appropriate for the industry;

(B) operate technology applications to perform workplace tasks;

(C) explain the use of point-of-sale systems;

(D) demonstrate knowledge in computer programs used for food production;

As it stands now, I have been meeting these requirements by showing visuals on how they work, demonstrating how the school cafeteria system works, and pointing out how where the system is located, connected, and used when we go on field trips! Fortunately a few of my students see these systems already at their part time jobs, so they are familiar with them. As you can see, it has been difficult to meet these requirements...I hope those reps have good news for me!

Ultimately if we had our own POS system it would really bring to life all the aspects of a full scale restaurant operation. It would immerse them into the hospitality industry's use of technology. The apps I uploaded were nice, but they aren't a POS and they never will be. Their purpose is different. There are so many areas of the hospitality field that a real POS systems manages that it would help the students see the usefulness of the tools available (and there are many such systems to choose from.) My students would be able to manage our micro-business much easier than the spreadsheet system we have been using for ordering, calculating costs, managing product loss, and predicting profit. They would be learning by using a real world tool and "doing" what a culinary professional would do in the real world... Always a bonus in my book.