Blog 4 SBTS Class

Professional Learning Networks
“Expanding Horizons – Engaging the Adult Members of your Community (Teachers, Administrators, and Parents) through the Use of Personal/Professional Learning Networks”

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=199

This presenter has set up a Ning community. His presentation is more of an ongoing shared learning space, in other words a Personal Learning Community Online.  It is a Creative Commons site that asks that you credit use of the information. He hopes that this becomes a shared learning space for working with teachers, administrators and parents.  He feels this is a safe way to begin to blog and share information with others. His community is http://plnk12online.ning.com/ and it is just getting rolling and building a community of technology educators. I will check back with his community and add it to my Google Reader to see what I can share here.

“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

Challenging Assumptions about Technology Professional Development
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=183

This was a very professional presentation and effective slideshow. The speaker first outlined the obstacles to successful technology professional development as:

• Requires changes in classroom management and pedagogy
• Outside trainings are hard to transfer to the classroom

I thought this page from her presentation that introduced her assumptions about Technology Professional Development was apropos to our daily life as SBTS:

Misnomers about Technology Professional Development

1. Many feel teachers do not get enough technology training
   1. Studies show teachers are getting enough technology training but 80% are not comfortable transferring it to the classroom.
2. Teachers can only learn about tech outside the classroom, once they learn and are comfortable with it they can use it in the classroom
   1. The apprenticeship model works best. Newcomers learn best from veterans
   2. Teachers learn well in a co-teaching environment
   3. The place of practice is the best place to learn; learn where you need it.

This quote she shared from Seymour Papert really made me think about our role as SBTS and some teachers’ lack of motivation to integrate technology: “What we need is the kinds of activities in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time. Unless you do that you’ll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school.”

This presenter’s solution to Technology Professional Development is to look to students as co-learners in a constructivist classroom where teachers are ‘guides on the side.’ She explained effectively technology integrated classrooms are collaborative, activity and student centered, inquiry based, democratic, reflective, and allow risk taking. By encouraging teachers to try new things in front of the students and tell them what they are doing, students witness a lesson lifelong learning. Students also need teachers to show them reasons to use technology for educational purposes.

The main point of this presentation, which I think is a shift in current thinking, teachers need students to help them learn how to use technology as a classroom tool. In a typical school 92% of the people in the school are students and 8% teachers and administrators. She believes the trickle down of professional development from the technology specialist to the teachers is not working. Students need to be counted on to model technology. When students see their input valued they will interact more and contribute more in the classroom. The goal of her organization, Gen Yes, is to pair a technology challenged teacher and technology savvy student. The students show how to teach lesson with technology, practice communication skills and learn teaching methods. She believes teachers like to learn from students because they go into teaching because they like to be with kids and like to learn from kids more than from adults.

I have included some of the slides from this presentation that I feel effectively demonstrate this way of thinking.

I really connected with this presentation and it made me feel motivated to push our school, teachers and students into a technology modeling environment where it is not just the SBTS doing the modeling. I also thought this presentation could have also fit in the Professional Learning Networks Strand.