Final Course Reflection

When I began this course a month ago, I looked at the title and assumed I would be learning about how to make decisions about teachers’ classrooms, professional development tools and how to run a school where students would learn and grow. While I certainly learned all of this, it wasn’t in the context I expected. What I realized though, is that to meet the needs of the 21^st century learner, teachers and instructional leaders need to perform all their traditional tasks, but find new ways to accomplish them. Oftentimes, integrating technology into our schools’ instructional and procedural systems will help us reach more students and families to ensure that all stakeholders’ needs are being met.

To some extent, I achieved the outcomes I expected. I thought I would learn how to be a strong instructional leader. I anticipated finding out how to create a professional learning community where teachers share ideas and collaborate freely. By completing this course, I thought that I would be on my way to becoming the kind of leader that teachers trust when she provides feedback on their instruction. I didn’t achieve these outcomes in traditional ways. I learned how to create a wiki so that my professional learning community could communicate. I realized that as a digital native, I can go into a teacher’s classroom and provide feedback on his or her use of technology. I’m still unsure of exactly how to build the community and how to create the level of trust I know my school will need, but I do know how to use technology to foster the kind of collaboration I’m looking for.

The objectives of this course clearly relate to my work at school. When I realized what my course would be about, I spoke with one of my students who has traditionally struggled. Isaias was the only student who failed my course last year and is repeating the ninth grade. I talked to him at length about my coursework and asked him a lot of questions along the way. From conversations with him, I ascertained that our teachers do not spend enough time using technology in the classroom. As a grade level chair, I feel responsible for this deficit in my teachers’ practice. I need to lead my team in the use of technology. I should be the one experimenting with new practices and modeling for my team at meetings. This coursework has been meaningful because it means that Isaias and all of my students will have the access to technology that they deserve.

Because I was so motivated by my students’ needs, I have felt very successful in this course. I feel that I have achieved all of the course objectives. Similarly, I found that if I completed the reading and participated in discussions, I was able to easily complete the assignments. Although I found the number of articles and number of discussion posts to be a little overwhelming, I worked hard to ensure that I was posting the quantity needed while retaining quality. More often than not, I believe that I succeeded in posting quality ideas to the discussion board. I felt especially successful in working with STaR charts and other data to ascertain my campus’ technology needs. From here, as I look at the scope of my own professional development, I plan to work on using technology to assess students. I can think of lots of ways to make this happen, I just need to learn a few basic skills to make online assessment possible for my students.

However, I realized that I know more about technology than I thought I did. After reading other people’s stories and comments about the articles, I realized that I’m actually a digital native. I remember when we get our very first computer with internet. I was in the third grade and it was 1991. There were only two people I could e-mail with (two of my dad’s friends from college), but I had e-mail! We had a CD-ROM drive before we ever had a CD player, so I listened to all my music on the computer. I can’t envision a world without e-mail. I don’t know how I would have learned without games like "Mavis-Beacon" and "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?". When my students express a desire to learn “off a screen,” I can sympathize. When Isaias asked me if he could do his homework on soft copy, I told him it was no problem. That’s how I’d prefer to work, too. Being a digital native puts me in a unique position to offer ideas and suggestions to my digital immigrant co-workers. I realized that I need to consider more fully how I’ll broach this subject with my colleagues. Many are very protective of their instructional strategies and are somewhat skeptical of a young teacher coming into their room to offer them feedback on instruction. I’d like to role play some of these conversations with another leader to ensure that I won’t alienate my senior colleagues.

One thing that I’d like to model for my colleagues is the use of blogs in the classroom. I tried to start a classroom blog last year and wasn’t able to maintain it. This year, I want my students to create blogs. Most already know how to create and maintain a blog from their digital publications class. I wouldn’t have to do a lot of teaching up-front, just regular encouragement for students to post. I think that putting the blogs in the hands of my students, making kids producers rather than consumers of the information, will allow my next blogging project to be more effective.

While blogs are excellent for sharing information in a timely manner and encouraging kids to write in short, focused bursts, there are several concerns. First, access is a concern. If I ask my students to blog, I need to ensure that all my students who don’t have internet access at home are able to get to a computer. Equal access is one of the largest challenges. It is also important to protect my students’ identities. People should not be able to find my students’ names or discover personal information about them. Protecting that blog could be a challenge, but there are several options. There are special blogging programs just for schools, there’s intranet, and password protection.

As I continue to develop myself as a leader, I’m looking for opportunities to communicate with my students and their families. I currently use a wiki to communicate with the team that I coach. When we’re going to have an extra practice or an important meeting, I’ll post the information to the wiki. Other students have posted their own study sessions and other helpful information. I love having the wiki for my team and am considering how to integrate it into my classroom.

In the realm of technology, I have a long way to go before I am the kind of leader I want to become. I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to grow in this area to ensure that my school is preparing its students for the 21^st century university experience and the workplaces of the future.

Week 4 Assignment

This is my technology action plan for my week 4 assignment.

Part 1: Development of an organization chart integrating technology

Teachers
Responsible for integrating technology into their lesson plans. Track use of laptops in mobile lab; teacher who has the lab signed out must ensure that all students are using their assigned computer and that computers are returned in the same state in which they were signed out. Also responsible for troubleshooting basic technology challenges in the classroom. Must fill out work orders on SchoolDude for any technology work that they cannot self-correct.

Campus Technologist
Provides professional development for teachers on integrating technology into their classrooms. Can co-teach a lesson on technology with enough notice. Manages our campus IT staff member. Also responsible for managing licensing of software. Ensures that all staff have the proper licenses. Coordinates all-campus updates of staff computers. Contracts out for webpage writing, including our detention management system.

Campus IT
Fulfills work-order requests for teachers who are having computer problems or need something new installed. Also monitors our CPU use to ensure that all computers continue to run smoothly.

Principal
Manages cost of technology. Plans budget. Selects relevant professional development for teachers.

Instructional Coach
Monitors teacher lesson plans and completes teacher observations to ascertain the level of tech integration across campus.

Librarian
Ensures school is abiding by copyright laws. Manages our subscriptions to online resources including Brainpop, EBSCO, Discovery Learning and other databases and research tools.

District IT director
Approves campus budget requests. Advises campus technologist (ours is managed by the principal) in decision making.

Part 2: Professional Development Planning
Using the campus and district improvement plans, and any suggested technology improvements, develop professional development activities that include the following:

• Reference analysis and lessons learned about the technology needs from the Week 3 report;
• Addresses professional development designed to improve the gathering, analysis and use of data from a variety of sources;
• Includes professional development to improve decision making in the integration of technology with instructional and organizational leadership.

Based on the analysis of the STaR chart data and both low and high inference data from teachers, students and staff, IDEA’s greatest area for growth is ensuring that teachers are able to seamlessly integrate technology into their regular lesson plans. We also need to ensure that our students are leaving the K-8 technology program with a core set of basic skills so that when they reach high school, students are able to use technology to learn rather than spending their time using to learn technology.
First and foremost, the principal, grade level chairs, content chairs and instructional coaches should work together to create a list of “technology masters,” teachers who are regularly integrating technology into their lessons and have found that it positively impacts student achievement. These teachers should be identified as models for the rest of our campus. Then, principals should implement an “observation challenge” where teachers are challenged to observe as many of the “technology masters” as they can during a two or three week period. For “credit” teachers could turn in an observation form to their manager. Perhaps at the end of the “observation challenge” there could be a small, motivational prize. This way, teachers would have the motivation to observe those who are moving forward in their technology integration.
Secondly, we should have a “new things in new ways” training where teachers are taught how to create a blog or wiki, to use the Quizzdom system and/or to use the wireless graphing calculator tools. Teachers could self-select so that the professional development would be differentiated. Many teachers don’t need the graphing calculator system or already know how to create a blog, so having a variety of options would ensure quality participation.
Finally, we need to expand the impact of our library. Right now, many teachers do not use the online resources that we have available because they simply do not know how. Kids search Google instead of NetTrekker because that’s how their teachers do it. If we modeled how to use these online resources (like databases and online encyclopedias), students would be able to use them more effectively. We need to start by allowing our librarian to put on a staff training where we all practice using these resources so that teachers feel more confident in sharing them with their students. This is critical as our students struggle with research skills. If teachers had a better command of the library research databases, we could pass those skills along to our students.

Part 3: Evaluation Planning for Action Plan
Evaluation of the technology action plan needs to start with teachers. First, what changes are principals and instructional coaches seeing in the planning phases? When they review teachers’ lesson plans, what are they finding? They should also monitor the sign-out of technology more closely. Who is signing out the mobile labs and quizzdom system? Who is signing up to bring their classes to the library for database training with the librarian? Administrators should monitor these areas to ensure that teachers are making an attempt to integrate technology. This will allow for a quantitative analysis of technology implementation across campus.
This low-inference, quantitative data is not sufficient. In their observations and debriefs, instructional coaches should be looking for and evaluating the quality of technology integration on the campuses. The observations will provide for more subjective data on how comfortable teachers seem with technology. In the corresponding debriefs, coaches should be asking guiding questions around the teachers’ use of technology to ascertain what is holding them back and what tools they need to continue making progress in the area of integrating technology.
The librarian would assess her component by issuing a survey (perhaps through SurveyMonkey—response rates are high when we use this tool) about the number of times teachers have used some of the different data tools. She could also provide low inference data on the number of hits each of those websites have from our IP address.