Ancient Concept, Modern Proportion

After the training ended, I am now been on to planning mode for the rest of the summer. Today I was fortunate to be part of a group that discussed online courses for our school district. This group comprised of all stakeholders in the process. (Board members, administrators, teachers, students). This was a purely theoretical and 35,000 foot view of the situation. From my perspective, there are a lot of benefits to teaching online or blended courses. Students can take courses they normally wouldn't have the opportunity to take in their high school. Students will learn skills they ordinarily wouldn't acquire in an in-person course. What I learned is, no matter what the mode of teaching: online, blended, or in-person, you need to have a dynamic educator who has the tools they need at their disposal. For an online course, the instructor needs to know how to use the platform well and promote a positive online learning community. For an in-person course - they need good interactive technologies and classroom tools to promote a dynamic learning community. In all cases, you need qualities educators with proper training, curriculum, and assessments.

My next task is to work with administrators to create goals for the upcoming year. Today, I solidified that one would be making sure my role as technology staff developer is fully integrated in to the staff development and curriculum development throughout the district. My job can't be ancillary to that. The staff developers have expertise I don't have, and I have expertise they do not. If we work together, I know we can effectively advance education, and use powerful technologies in the process.

The group told me about http://www.quia.com/. It's a subscription based service with interactive quizzes, puzzles, games, books, and a whole lot of other interactive content. I learned that two teachers purchased a subscription with their own funds ($49 per year). All of the teachers said they would use it if they had subscriptions. They just didn't know how to go about getting a subscription through the district. This is the part of the job that is going to have a learning curve. I need to now figure out how they can get subscriptions. I believe there are some forms that need to be filled out........now to find them. 

In this entry I don't want to focus on the ending, it would be extremely difficult for me to sum up the most incredible professional and personal experience of my lifetime. The past eight years have been amazing. I am thrilled to be able to continue my work in the district and grow even further as a learner and educator.

This blog will be used as a resource of information and a reflective journal. I am just adding to its current function. 

For the next week I act as SmartBoard trainer. The foreign language teachers in the middle schools are all having SmartBoards installed in their classrooms. This week is being used to train them to effectively use them. This training will continue through the entire year. It is my core belief that you can't just stick a piece of technology in front of an educator and say "go teach". I am hoping this week will allow them to forge a relationship with me that will last for a long time to come. Today will be used for relationship building and an introduction to the board. I only have an hour with the group today. The rest of the day is going to be used for planning and other work.

Feel free to post positive comments about educators and teacher innovation there.