When I set out to write a weekly blog as part of my position as a K-12 technology coach a few years back, I intended to write regular updates about specific projects, activities and classroom co-teaching I would be doing. However, I find myself usually writing more abstractly about educational technology ideas and methods than actual lessons.
Two days into this busy week, I'd like to give a snapshot into what I am doing as a coach:
* Working with teacher leaders who will facilitate eight excellent training sessions during the April 24th Engagement In-Service day. Planned sessions include blogging, making video podcasts, using Google Apps for Education, and many more topics that enable teachers to engage their students while preparing them with 21st Century skills they will need for college and the workplace.
* Facilitating an online flex session I designed to help teachers learn how to use Wikispaces. The flex session takes place entirely online, at the teachers' own pace, schedule, and location, during a two-week window. Teachers watch videos, read articles, and participate in discussions to earn two hours' flex, and can earn a third hour by creating and sharing a link to their own educational wiki. The conversations we've been having in our online discussions have been great, and I am proud to offer this cost-saving (more participants enrolled, no building/energy costs) and engaging (teachers get to design their own wikis for classroom use and have their individual questions answered on their own time) method of professional development.
* Helping 6th grade students put the finishing touches on their weekly news broadcast at Walton Farm elementary school. The news team rotates every week, and this week's broadcast had a particularly strong group of students writing, recording, and editing. As the editor puts the final transitions between the anchors, the field reporters, and the special segments, I can tell their hard work is paying off and an excellent edition of the school news is shaping up!
* Co-teaching a 12th grade English class as they begin a multi-faceted project based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. One component of the group project is performance-based, and I am helping students collaborate on writing their scripts, then record, edit, and share their final performances.
* Working with an 11th grade teacher to develop her class wiki project based on duality in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Students will collaborate to fill in multiple pages of information in T-chart form, sharing concrete examples they find in the text and exploring many themes of duality in the novel.
* Working with a Kindergarten teacher to help me make the specific connections between technology competencies and the Kindergarten curriculum. Our goal is to have K-12 tech competencies aligned with specific lessons and activities already in the curriculum, to give our teachers a place to go to see exactly how technology can be seamlessly integrated with the content we already teach.
* Helping the director of activities at the high school create a new web page for the school's activities and clubs.
* Surveying participants in my upcoming flex session called "Everything You Wanted to Know About Your Computer ... *But Were Afraid to Ask." The session takes place in a few weeks, and the agenda is designed to answer the specific questions of the teachers who enroll in the flex session. To my knowledge, this is the only flex session of its kind in our district, where the agenda is built to answer the specific needs of the participants. I look forward to hearing from them what I will be learning and teaching in a few weeks' time.
* Answering the emails and requests that come in to our online Help Request every day, researching the answers and responding to teachers' specific technology needs in a timely "on-demand" fashion.
With a difficult budget looming ahead for next year, it looks like my position will not exist in our district next year. While I am personally excited to teach English again and looking forward to bringing the ideas I've developed over the last five years into an actual classroom of my own, I do wonder how all the needs that coaches fill will be met. Schools are surviving difficult times and doing the best they can with limited budgets, but I don't suppose they will be met as well. We, like most districts in our state, will suffer from the lack of coaching until better budget days return and these positions can be restored. More than ever, teachers will have to rely on the resources that coaches and others have created. We will adapt, and we will make do, but I hope, for our students' sake, that we can get through these "lean years" quickly, and return to the proven and effective coaching model soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment