Blog 4 SBTS Class

“The Technology Specialist as Teacher Leader: Strategies to Ensure Successful Technology Integration and Student Learning in Schools”

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=186

I was drawn to this conference because it was led by our own Patrick Ledesma. He hit the nail on the head about our roles as SBTS and also help me think about where I need to focus.

Technology Leadership Challenges

·        School realities

·        Everything needs to tie to the curriculum.

·        Need to provide meaningful staff development to a variety of skill sets

·        The job is a balancing Act of Managing Hardware, Administartive Coordination, Teacher Prof. Dev, Teacher Collaboration,

There are three views of this role, the repair person, the helper or personal assistant and the instructional leader. We need to be focused on being instructional leaders who are designing lesson plans, modeling, enhancing learning, co-teaching and especially working directly with students.

Successful SBTS needs to:

·        Understand your school: demo, admin, teachers, students

·        Manage Environment – do your procedures encourge independence? Or enable a failure to learn technology

·        Collaborate and Coordinate

·        Set goals- Essential, dream, short term, long term, team goals

·        Offer opportunites but move on with or without teachers who won’t get on board

·        Face resistances like teachers do in the classroom: SBTS responsibility is to teach and teacher’s responsibility is to learn