Friday, January 07, 2005

Teaching with Technology

Teaching with Technology: Creating Student-Centered Classrooms states that for effective change to occur teachers must be aware of their own beliefs AND they must also become aware of alternative belief systems and experience the positives of those. Professional Development can help teachers to investigate those alternative beliefs.

As technology specialists, one of the big dangers of professional development is to think of the technology professional development as something isolated from good teaching practice. Far too often, we tend to focus on the technology – the hardware or the software. This is not effective – it does not compel teachers to confront their beliefs, and it does not provide any context for their learning. Hence, for the majority of teachers who attend these professional development sessions, learning becomes short term and meaningless, with little occurring after initial instruction. Good technology professional development is integrated into other professional development initiatives of the school. For example, a school may have brain-based research or Understanding By Design as a professional development focus. It would be effective technology professional development if the technology pieces were woven into the instruction in the focus areas, teaching the technology tools as needed, not in isolation. Teachers would acquire the technology skills along with the new models of learning, giving meaning to both. It’s not only good teaching practice, but it is modeling good technology use and how it relates to pedagogy. Another reason not to isolate technology professional development: Technology is not the single answer (there is no single answer) to school change. It can certainly play a significant role. The fact is, even without technology, we could still make school interesting, motivating, student-centered, and all that other good stuff.

Another big piece of the professional development puzzle is following through. The flaw with most professional development as run in our schools is that we make no effort to support teachers in moving to the next step. Without that support, it is too easy for the teacher to give in to the pressures of time and energy. Professional development must have follow-up support built in, whether it be collaboration with peers, or follow up with a curriculum or technology specialist as appropriate. This tends to require extra money and is therefore cut when the going gets rough. What school systems don’t realize is they negate all their previous efforts and investment when they don’t provide follow up and support.

We also need to think of new models for professional development. One size fits all is not appropriate. We wouldn’t teach children that way, so why provide professional development to teachers that way? The days of the entire faculty being talked at should be over. We need to assess the needs of our teachers and provide the opportunities and support for them to grow in meaningful ways. We also need to think outside of the box in how we structure the delivery of professional development services. Instead of whole-day in-services, maybe an hourly requirement each year would be more effective. Teachers, along with their administration, or teaching colleagues could develop collaborative plans that are accomplished after hours in ways that they find effective and meaningful.

Posted by Randy on 01/07 at 09:21 PM
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Thursday, January 06, 2005

ISTE Institute

Near the end of January, four of us from Emmaus High School are going to the ISTE Institute, to be held in Orlando, FL for two days. I am very excited about going, even if we have to be in a sunny, warm climate for 4 days (give or take a few hours) grin . For the first time I think that we have the potential to get some really good things going in the area of technology and professional development. We are going in with some definate goals and some ideas about how we can reach them. Hopefully the Institute will crystallize all of this and make it more real.

Liz and I had a pretty good meeting with our Director of Research and Evaluation today. It was fun to throw around some ideas. More of this needs to be happening here! We will be taking our Technology Integration Plan, Logic Model and Rationale piece, as well as Professional Development materials we currently have in place (not much really). Our goal is to develop a plan to (1) increase the number of student-centered learning opportunities in the classroom; (2) look at alternative assessment and seek out examples; (3) increase collaboration among teachers; and (4) develop inter-disciplinary applications.

We hope to implement a plan with the teachers in the technology-enhanced rooms that gives us some data on effective ways of implementing professional development that will move us toward these goals. The logic model that we’ve developed is really good. I am so looking forward to working on this. We have a good team, and a great Principal who is making all this happen. Sometimes there are things to get excited about around here!

Posted by Randy on 01/06 at 04:08 PM
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Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Collaboration

Last July I attended the ISTE Conference in New Orleans. It was a pretty good conference and one of the most interesting sessions was presented by David Warlick. Even though it was the last session of the conference, it provoked a lot of thinking and confirmed ideas that I already had in my head. After investingating a little further, I noticed that he has published two book: Raw Materials for the Mind and Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. Since then, I purchased the two books (along with so much else that is waiting to be read and digested!) and have started reading Raw Materials...

Some of the material might be a little dated, but the basic principals ring true. In the section on collaboration there is a really neat project that he describes called the Eco-Marketing Project. I looked for it on the web, but the link is broken. It is obviously designed for project-based learning and asks kids to design, develop, market and sell a product that they think other students would buy. They need to write a persuasive ‘essay’ to convince others that their product is the one that should be purchased. I thought this would be a really neat idea to do with an English class. Their project also had students posting their projects on the Internet along with their descriptions. Other students visited the site and voted for the projects they would spend their fake $200 on. I need to check into what our capabilities are in terms of technology to devise a project like this, but it would be really neat to do this. The project also has multidisciplinary aspects to it also: they need to actually make a prototype of the product and learn about the marketing side, including math. Depending on the kind of project, subjects like science could easily be included.

I am looking forward to finishing this book and digging into the second, shorter work of David’s. 

Posted by Randy on 01/05 at 01:10 PM
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