Journal,+Module+1


 * Prompt: Describe a technology experience you had this week. **

I am part of a faculty focus group whose purpose is to provide school wide suggestions in terms of advancing 21st Century Skills within our school. Over the past school year we wrote and conducted a survey of the faculty asking with how much intention they were meeting our own set of 21st Century Skills objectives (the objectives were are a compilation of several different sets of standards that the group put together last year). We also asked open ended questions about what each teacher thinks is their greatest area of opportunity in terms of the standards and what assistance or support would they like to see come from the administration in terms of furthering these goals.
 * Description: **

While the amount of intention and areas of opportunity for the objectives varied greatly, the thing that I found particularly interesting was that in terms of requests for support from the administration nearly every faculty member requested professional development. The types of professional development varied from a non-specific need for general PD to specific request for more time or additional training. The interesting about this is that we have a technology integration specialist on staff and we have 2 hours of professional development time built into our schedule every week during the regular school day. These opportunities are constantly available already and simply need to be utilized intentionally.

This request for additional professional development was at first frustrating to me. It is my first year at this school, and, coming from a school where professional development time was a wasted joke, I know that our school is very fortunate to have administration dedicated to providing this time and faculty dedicated to wisely using this time. It was with this frustrated mindset that I was doing my reading for the week and was reading about how professional development, especially technology training, must be made as content-specific as possible. I really did already know this; I have done a lot of reading about the need for a pedagogical shift when moving into a 1:1 program and all the literature on that talks about how we must bring technology to curriculum rather than letting technology guide the curriculum.
 * Impact: **

In terms of our school, we now have a new learning management system that we all received some basic training on when it first went into use but there was no school-wide department level initiative to find ways to enhance the current curriculum with the technology, so for the most part the system has been not utilized (or underutilized at best). I use the system some in my class, but the online interface is very text-driven rather than geared towards visual representations and that is hard for me use. However, I do have a [|Google site] that I have been using since before we started using the portals system that I have linked to my portals page through rss feeds. So, I utalize the outside system that works better for me because it is more visual and I still provide all of the information for my students in the centralized learning management system.

Therefore, because of the reminder that the reading gave me, I have been thinking of things to add to our list of suggestions for next year that are more aimed towards bring technology into the current curriculum rather than trying to find ways to integrate our curriculum into technology. Based on these ideas I offered the following suggestions to our list to be presented in the next few weeks:
 * Intent: **

Improve and diversify the overall function of current technology facilities and resources (beyond just the computers themselves)
 * 1) Put enough desks in SC08 (the computer lab) to be able to move students away from the computers to give directions, break lessons into different parts, differentiate, etc
 * 2) (In addition to or instead of #1) provide a computer stations room with more space to work, just a few computers for group work, and lots of tables. (I have some really interesting articles on [|one]and [|two] computer classrooms that explain this better).
 * 3) Change computer lab sign up to 45 minute sign ups (can still sign up for whole 90 minutes) to provide diversity in lessons, more focused computer time, and less of a “lets just sit and “work” on the project for two days” attitude. (I recognized that I was guilty of this too, so I’ve started signing it out for just half a block. And the travel time isn’t a big deal: It’s no more than what we spend getting out laptops)
 * 4) Professional development aimed at incremental/goal oriented utilization of the portals (ways to use dropboxes, ways to use RSS feeds and how to set them up, etc)

I feel like these suggestions provide more productive suggestions than just saying "learn how to use your professional development time and resources more wisely", which is what I was tempted to say when I first looked at the survey results.