I am approaching this year as one that will see us playing a bigger role in Professional Development. You are ever expanding your repertoire of technology knowledge and I hope we continue using our monthly meetings as opportunities for further learning. I welcome your comments and thoughts about last year as well as suggestions for this school year. Web 2.0 tools will continue to be used by more and more teachers as they see what other teachers are doing with them in their own classrooms. I would be happy to help you learn about these tools! Please don't be shy at volunteering to share your own expertise!
Tablet PCs will be provided to many more teachers this summer and fall and instruction will fall upon our shoulders. Add to that, Office 2007, and we are already setup for a pretty busy year. So how do we approach Professional Development (PD) to help teachers make sense of it all? I don't see late start days, institute days or even revolving faculty meetings as an answer.
For me, this is an opportunity to step back, slow down, and assess where teachers are developmentally with technology. You and I can jump all over technology and see the benefits but that doesn't mean other teachers will, too.
I truly believe teachers want sustained help with technology. This seems to be the number one complaint from teachers around the US. One day, or one hour snippets of tech may nudge a teacher to investigate but a sustained use by the teacher will not occur unless there is continual support available. The more we can make ourselves available and approachable to teachers, the more we will be viewed as agents of change. One idea is to invoke the All-volving method of PD where a Tech Coach works with a teacher during the entire school year to help the teacher with some aspect of technology. HEHS has used this approach successfully in the past. This idea was also received favorably when I tossed it out there at our last Staff Development meeting in May. (I'll provide more details at our first meeting.) Karl Craddock has suggested that Tech Coaches should rotate to different departments on a daily basis. This is a great idea, too! (How do you feel about that?) Either way, we need to get teachers to realize that teachers exist beyond their own departments who can assist, provide ideas, and walk the talk when it comes to making technology an integral part of their day. These people should be you and me and anyone else who fit this description.
Wes Fryer, author of Moving at the Speed of Creativty, says,
To make technology integral to learning, teachers must be able to seamlessly use
technology tools throughout the day as they access, use and share information.
It must become part of the way teachers process and work in their world.
Personal uses of technology are pivotal here, in fact I am sure they are a
prerequisite to higher level uses of technology throughout the curriculum. I
think too many leaders want teachers to skip developmental steps in their own
technology use, and taking that approach is as developmentally inappropriate as
giving a kindergartner an encyclopedia to read instead of a picture book.
So, we (or is it more me?) have a new beginning. Please let me know your thoughts!
