What Worked!

This year was extremely busy, which really is a testament to the work we did last year to visit every school and get our name out there. I also am sure that the Tech Tip of the Week videos we sent out every Friday int he Fall had a LOT to do with how busy we were. Each week, after we'd hit send, we'd get 20-40 responses and requests for us to come to people's classrooms and work on the tech.

We were, at times, way too busy to keep up with the requests, but that is what we wanted! We really approached the position int he way we would market a small business... only we wouldn't make more money by how much business we'd generate, we'd just get busier.

The thinking was that the more excellent work we did, the more likely our district would be to keep the position and expand it to more coaches.

Unfortunately, no matter how much we accomplished, that was not going to happen in next year's budget.

However, we can look back on the last two years and find a LOT to not only make us proud, but to serve as a model for future technology integration coaching endeavors in our district, which really MUST return when the budget conditions improve!

Here are some of THIS YEAR'S accomplishments and highlights:        

·         Facilitated 25 Flex Sessions & multiple in-service / professional development workshops and training sessions. Highlights included planning, organizing, and helping facilitate eight teacher-led workshop sessions for the Engagement In-service Day in April.

·         Logged 465 unique individual teachers who participated in PD / Training / Flex sessions

·         Logged 480 instances of 1:1 tech integration work for 2011-201. Some highlights include:

a)    DVD video of 21 Oak Park 2^nd graders making Presidential Speeches

b)    End of Year “Move Up Day” video for Gwyn-Nor assembly

c)    Walton Farm’s Wildcast News – 6 episodes this year

d)    2^nd graders at Montgomery making Animoto videos and Toon Doo projects

e)    12^th grade science dissection Skyped to 6^th grade class at Oak Park

f)     Pennfield special ed rubrics turned into Google templates for shared use

g)    Facilitated follow-up sessions for iPad users at Gwennyd Sguare and NPHS

h)    co-presented Smart Board training to 74 teachers, mostly new users, this fall

i)     helped 17 teachers use CPS clickers this year

j)     helped 5 teachers get started with Kid Blog

k)    helped 15 teachers use Edmodo with their classes

l)     helped 31 teachers with Google Applications such as Docs and Forms

m)  did follow-up training on Schoolwires with 34 teachers

n)    helped 16 teachers improve their use of Outlook email, distribution lists, etc.

o)    did follow-up training on Wikispaces with 44 teachers

p)    helped NPHS Assistant Principal collect & manage data from Senior Survey

q)    helped NPHS Assistant Principal record audio for 4 AP exams

r)     designed and facilitated Geo-caching station for Walton Farm’s Science Day

                       

·         Maintained an informative and effective District Web Page for Academic Integration in 2011-2012.

·         Collected all of our work, notes and projects on NP Tech Tools Wiki.

·         Posted this blog weekly, with 62 posts this year!

·         Created weekly tech tip video podcasts, with 53 entries over two years.

All things considered, this position was a HUGE success. I know that not only because I have personally worked with more than 900 of the district's roughly 1000 teachers over the past few years, but because of how many of them have approached me this month and told me, "I don't know what we'll do without you next year!"

I know what you'll all do. You'll figure it out. You'll find and rely on your tech savvy students for their expertise. You'll search effectively for training manuals and videos. You will ask your colleagues for assistance. You will (I hope!) continue to check out the resources we've posted on NP Tech Tools. You'll use the skills of our Tech Assistants and library staff.

While I firmly believe in the coaching model, and see great value in having teachers with scheduled time (part or full) to research educational technology, help their peers integrate, plan PD sessions, and train their colleagues, the end goal has always been to train our staff to get by without us! The goal, as we've often joked in our office, was to make our positions obsolete. That didn't quite happen yet, of course. I've been working on projects for teachers every minute of the workday (and most of my evenings at home) for the last month of the school year, so it's safe to say there was still a lot of use for coaches. But the position will not be here next year, and for now, you'll have to figure it out on your own.

So do it. Integrate 21st Century Skills. Create project- and problem-based learning opportunities for your students. Never stop learning. 

I know you will do phenomenally well!  :)

What Didn't Work

There are only two Tuesdays left before the school year ends, and I finish my tenure as an Academic Integration Coach. That means I have only two more posts as a tech coach before shifting this blog over to that of a techie-English-teacher (slash-sports-fan-slash-rock-n-roller).

I figured I would use the last two entries to look back, first at what has not worked well, and finally at what has been successful in our district's experimentation with technology integration.

As I've mentioned in this blog, I have been ready for a change for several months. I am happy to be returning to the classroom next year, and excited to be putting into practice what I've learned over the past five years. As a high school CFF Coach, then a Learning Coordinator for K-12 Technology Integration, and finally as a K-12 Academic Integration Coach, I have had five years of non-stop professional development. I have learned so much from attending conferences, and especially from my colleagues across the state, who share their questions and ideas every day on the CFF Coaches' list-serve. It was very difficult, however, to put to practice what I've learned without any students of my own.

When I originally left the classroom with the CFF grant in 2007, I asked to be the half-time coach, which would have enabled me to continue teaching for half of the day and act as coach during the rest. I believed then, as I do now, that the best coaching (and administration, management, etc.) comes from people who are actually doing what they teach. Unfortunately for me, the half position needed to go to the math department, and I became full-time CFF coach with Tommy as the half. While I was able to work intensely for five years, and I am very grateful for the way things have gone, this brings me to the first thing that does not work in technology integration:

1) Tech Coaches should teach  -- teachers are more inspired by colleagues who are doing what they are teaching in professional development sessions than they are by colleagues who have done it in the past. Having coaches teaching for half of the day would enable...

2) MORE Tech Coaches -- We need more. ONE part-time coach PER BUILDING would be ideal. Just free up a small portion of someone's day by giving him or her one less class to teach. That would save on the travel costs of sending one person to 18 buildings, as I did for the past few years. More importantly, it would allow teachers and coaches to work together regularly and build a good rapport. Sadly, our district went the other way, starting with two coaches for the high school, moving toward one for elementary and one for secondary, then going to two and a half for K-12, then to two for K-12, then one for K-12, and now, in next year's budget, it looks like none.

3) Regular Communication with Faculty -- I can see the statistics on this one clearly. We sent a Tech Tip of the Week podcast to everyone in the district for half of the year. In the first half of the year, we answered 372 help requests for individual 1:1 tech integration assistance. Since January, when we stopped sending out our weekly tip, we have only answered 162. Every time we sent a message to our entire district, we would recieve dozens and dozens of replies, usually asking for us to come work. It was a great strategy. I recommend our district use this strategy in the future for technology integration. Once we stopped sending a link to the tech tip every week to everyone, our requests for help dropped off. We "fell off the radar" for the average teacher.  As I travel around the district now, teachers constantly ask why we don't make our amazing tech tips anymore. I keep saying, "We do! We post them on our website every week, just as we did all year last year. We only sent them out in the fall to raise awareness of our position and what we do, but we figured by now everyone knew where to find them, so we stopped flooding your inbox with them each week. " Well, raising awareness only works when it is continued. For any future iterations of technology coaching to be successful, these messages should continue. Administration should make it a priority to support regular communication from technology coaches to help busy teachers have an easy avenue to learn about and learn how to use new ed tech.

4) Interactive Whiteboards -- One complaint I have heard regularly from teachers this year is that we did not do enough training on SMART Boards, or Promethean Boards, the two IWBs we use in our district. I think my personal pedagogy got in the way of this one when I became the only tech coach left. I am a firm believer that a school district's funds are wasted on IWBs. To me, they seem a flashy public display that looks good to taxpayers, but is not a necessary expense. We don't need to train teachers in how to make notebooks and flip books! All we need is a way to project a computer so every student can see it, and connect that computer to the web-based applications that house the students' research, collaborative projects, original work, etc. Well, my belief is based on my own teaching style, but I think we missed the mark with the general teaching population. Perhaps a little more training on the basic operations of these boards would have been a big benefit to many teachers... and who knows? Perhaps they would have eventually seen the light and moved away from their Notebooks and Flipcharts down the road as part of a natural progression toward better integration. Looking back, we could have offered more IWB trainings. Whether they actually need it or not, our teachers are SAYING they need it, and I would have liked to give them more.

5) Believing one-size-fits-all -- It doesn't. Trying to cram a few select websites, no matter how good they are, into district-wide training sessions is bad. While this works for Internet safety, or daily operations like Office applications and our email, we don't need everyone in the district getting the same training on a private label wiki, or a teacher web-page, or our own private Google Docs, etc. I think we might be heading down the wrong path by only supporting and training a limited number of programs. Instead, having more coaches to assist teachers, we should do much more response-to-need training, and assist teachers in safely and effectively using whatever program meets their curricular needs and personal comfort levels with its use.

Sadly, it will not be next year that we are able to make these improvements. Tech coaching seems to be going away, for now. I am sure it will be revisited in the near future. I hope we are able to bring back technology (and all other!) coaches in a future budget. Teachers learn so much better from our peers, and the best way to maintain an excellent staff is to provide meaningful and excellent professional development in response to the needs of the individual staff members. I look forward to a day when our district will once again embrace this model, and hope we will improve upon some of these areas I mentioned.

Next week, on to a much brighter topic. I will reflect on so much that went right in technology integration over the past five years. See you next Tuesday. :)