Blog 6: Technology Training

The technology skills at my school have significantly increased in the last year in part because of a cohort of teachers who completed their specialist degrees in IT and have taken a leadership role in offering “Tech Tip Tuesday” emails and several PD sessions throughout the year. They try to tailor their tips to be relevant to the month; October was a PSAT preparation app, for example, since we gave the PSAT to more than half of our student population in mid-October. They also make themselves available any time via email and will gladly come down to a teacher’s room on their planning periods or before or after school to help. These efforts fit in with the assertion in the “Coaching Whitepaper” that coaching works best when it incorporates context, relevance, and ongoing as three essential components. With the renewed flow of money and consequential expansion of the central office staff, we now have technology integration specialists who work with clusters of schools. Their sessions follow this model as well, but they are less accessible as an in-house teacher. The media specialists could bridge this gap, but at our school there is little of this occurring, in part because they have been appropriated for other jobs such as manning the textbook room (an atrocity and waste of talent, in my opinion). Another way the media specialist could fulfill the duties is by joining, modeling, and encouraging social networks for professional development. Richard Dufour is quoted in the “Coaching Whitepaper” as follows: “To create a professional learning community, focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively, and hold yourself accountable for results.” Instead of trying to be the expert, delivering a how-to on the latest gadget or software, the media specialist can be a collaborative learner, working with teachers to produce technology-rich lessons and opportunities for creation of technology-rich products. The media specialist has the resources and the research expertise to bring to the table, and the teacher has the content knowledge and pedagogical expertise to develop a plan. Both should be learning something from the process of collaborating.

As I transition from teacher to media specialist, I do not want to lose the opportunity to teach, and the instructional coaching model would allow me to continue to do so. As teachers we often complain about PD where some “expert” tries to tell us how to do something magical in the classroom, but he or she hasn’t been in a classroom in a long time, and with no follow-up, we simply don’t bother to try to implement the new idea. Instructional coaching solves this problem by having the coach and teacher collaborate to plan, the coach model in the classroom, the coach then observe the teacher, and finally the two regroup and assess the efficacy of the new idea. It takes a visionary leader to make this happen, and a media specialist needs to take this leadership role. Likewise as Chris Lehman is quoted in the “Coaching Whitepaper,” “Technology should be like oxygen: Ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” Creating a Blackboard shell with a bunch of links for teachers to use when they have the time is like creating a filing cabinet in the media center for teachers to use when they have the time. It’s going to collect dust and be useful to no one. Integrating the social networks with a focus on collaborative learning makes the technology more like oxygen, and it becomes as effortless as breathing. It’s simply a part of life to consult the network for gathering and sharing ideas. Our media specialists complain that when they do schedule sessions, only a few come. If the PD is delivered with the technology that is already an extension of ourselves and so often that it becomes ubiquitous, then it better meets the needs and the lifestyles of today’s teachers than signing up for an arbitrary session does. I would create these structures through the media center website, wikis, Twitter, and any other technology I heard of so that it is not just once a month but every day that teacher’s see the integration of technology. I would also be out there observing classes, taking my media lessons to the classroom when possible, and establishing relationships with teachers as peer learners. I would troll their blogs and offer resources to enhance their current units of study or offer to teach a lesson when integration of research or technology was relevant. It’s an exciting role because I love learning and feared giving that up to be a custodian of books.