What's Working

I am taking a moment to celebrate our successes.

Today we helped our "100th customer," meaning the three Academic Integration Coaches, who keep a log of the people we work with to integrate technology in their classrooms, have now logged over 100 entries.

We helped plan and facilitate a technology-based in-service day for teachers in grades 4-6 on October 11, which opened a lot of new eyes to collaborative, web-based porgrams and increased our workload with lots of new requests to work with us. We've got a second in-service day coming up on November 8th, where we will be conducting several Microsoft Office training sessions throughout the day.

We also do after-school training sessions for teachers to earn flex credit while learning about integrating technology. We have offered more than 20 sessions since August, with three scheduled in the next two weeks. We are well beyond 100 participants in these sessions, and they are rating us highly. When teachers follow up on the effectiveness of our training sessions, they are consistently giving us a four or five, with five being the highest possible score.

To help me follow up with the participants in my training sessions, I keep a record of teachers I have trained. According to my distribution list, which filters out repeat names, I am approaching my 600th unique person since I began working with technology integration in 2008. In a district of around 1000 teachers, that is an accomplishment worth celebrating!


As teachers on special assignment in this difficult budget, our position will be reevaluated every year. We were told we will really need data to show that our impact is worth the district's investment, which is why we keep the log, write our blogs, write follow-up emails to participants in our training sessions, and conduct pre- and post-surveys of district faculty.

We want to do more than keep our positions. We want to expand. We know the value of having teachers who are prepared to put the best resources in their students' hands, and we would love to see our small Academic Integration department grow to include more teachers on assignment to assist even more classrooms with tech integration.

What's working so far is our help request system, where teachers complete a form on our website to reach us for help with problem solving, ideas, training on programs and applications, co-teaching, and other forms of integration. When this is combined with the 40+ flex training sessions we've planned for this year, follow-ups via e-mail and face-to-face interactions, and word-of-mouth, our first two months have been a success.

Moving forward, I'd like to see us build a collection of training documents that can be accessed online. We do this with our weekly podcast, Tech Tip of the Week, which are archived on our website. But we can do more in this area. I'm envisioning a searchable database of up-to-date training manuals and guides for using the forms of technology we are most frequently asked to help teachers and students utilize. I'd love some suggestions about how to improve in this area.

Thank you to everyone who has worked with us this year. We're incredibly busy, but willing to take on more. Contact an Academic Integration Coach today!