Year in Review

These are interesting times, with an abundance of blog topics from which to choose. Our association is voting today on a pay freeze proposed by the school board. Our last teacher day is tomorrow. The AICs each presented six training sessions during the last three in-service days. And tomorrow I will interview to continue doing my job integrating technology next year, under a slightly different job title and description.

Still, I can't help looking back at what was an incredible year. In any other year, in any other budget, the three K-12 Acadmic Integration Coaches would be closing our office doors for the summer and making plans to continue our work over the summer and into next year. Instead, the great run the three of us had will come to an end, at least in it's current form, tomorrow when we close our buildings for the summer and head out into uncertainty.

We worked with over 75% of our district's 1000+ teachers this year, through 72 training sessions we began last July and continued through today, as well as nearly 500 instances of on-the-job tech coaching in response to individual classroom needs. When our teachers take their exit surveys on their self-reported levels of technology use and integration, I am confident the results will show we made some great strides. Student tech use is up, and students are doing much more higher-level thinking, project-based learning, and collaboration using web 2.0 tools than they were a year ago. The three of us worked tirelessly this year so that, at the very least, we could end the year with the confidence that no one could have done a better job in our situation. I look at our teacher feedback - the highest-rated and most consistently well-attended of any flex sessions offered in our district, the most flex sessions of any content area, and the over 100 positive responses we received within 24 hours when we asked our colleagues to come to our aid in this difficult budget and demonstrate the need for continuing our efforts next year. While the position will be there - with a different name and reduced to two people - it WILL be there, thanks to the efforts of our technology administrators and our cabinet's willingness to listen to them when they said that tech coaches are not an added luxury, but a necessity in this day and age.

The personnel will change. Jason has moved to another career, and Wendy's status as a long-term sub when our budget allows for no new hires and no filling of vacancies means neither will share the office with me. Our collaboration for this one brief school year was something I will treasure, and use as a model for working as part of a team in the future. Jason's spark of creativity and big picture ideas concerning what education needs to be, and Wendy's uncanny ability to take a tech concept and teach it to the least tech-savvy among us, will be greatly missed. They join a long line of excellent educators who have left our district in recent years. I will use everything I learned from these two coaches if I am fortunate enough to continue in my position next year, working with a new teammate.

The website we built this year, NPTechTools.wikispaces.com, will continue to serve as a launching point for teachers who wish to integrate technology into their lesson plans, and I hope it will continue to grow as teachers learn and share new methods. Our weekly Tech Tips podcasts will stand for teachers to use whenever they find themselves ready to take on a new task or project. And we will continue to work with colleagues from around the state and country in professional learning networks we've built using Twitter, Skype, and list-serves.

It was never about the technology. Our mission was always about LEARNING, powered by technology, and we worked together to take the resources at our disposal and make them "100% better."

I will miss these two great colleagues, but whether I am in the classroom or continuing on the path to help every teacher and every student develop the skills they need to thrive in the 21st century, I'll do everything I can to power education through technology, and I plan to continue to write about my adventures right here, every Tuesday. There is a lot of reason to take great pride in our district, its schools, and its incredible teachers. I know we will work through this adversity and return to being the world class institution we once were. Keep the faith, keep working, and don't give up! Thanks for reading along with me this year. See you next Tuesday!