Making Technology Change in Schools. Just Do It

Transforming My Own Work to Transform the Work of Others
from LeaderTalk by leadertalk@gmail.com (UCEA CASTLE)

Cross posted at PargoNet

For the past 2 years, I have created professional development
opportunites during the summer for our teachers and any other faculty
member who wished to join on web 2.0 tools and strategies to use them
in the classroom. While the workshops have been well attended, I have
only seen “pockets of excellence” as my superintendent
calls it. In other words, the workshops have not transformed the way
all teachers teach in the district. Rather, a small number of teachers
have begun doing amazing things in their classrooms, but the number of
teachers doing so is small.

So I have changed my strategy. While I will continue to offer summer
professional growth opportunities in this area, I have begun attacking
this problem with another approach - and it really is nothing radical.
I have begun modeling the use of these tools for every meeting and
interaction I have with teachers, administrators, and my technology
specialists and media specialists. Below are some examples of the way
I have modeled the use and the effects it is already having:

1. Graduation Project - The Director of Secondary Education, Sherri
Martin, asked me to work with her to facilitate a series of committee
meetings to develop a 21st Century Graduation Project that will be
required of all graduating seniors beginning with this year’s
sophomore class - this is a state requirement. It seemed to me that if
the students were going to be asked to incorporate 21st Century Skills
into their project, the educators working with them better learn
pretty quickly what those skills and tools look and feel like. So I
did two things: rather than create a traditional web site with all of
the committee info, Sherri and I created a wiki and shared the
password with the committee. Additionally, the committee is divided
into five work groups, each of which has a specific aspect of the
graduation project to work on and a document to produce. So I set up a
Google doc for each group and have them working in these docs
collaboratively even outside of the committee meetings. I shared
Common Craft’s video on Google Docs in Plain English with them
so that they would understand why we were using this approach rather
than the traditional Word Doc over email method. They were all very
excited about this concept and one teacher asked, “you mean my
students could use this to collaborate on their projects?” With
a smile, I said “Yes they Can!” One of the administrators
left this meeting to immediately set up a Google doc to work on with
one of his groups, and more importantly, created a Google calendar to
share with her co-workers - and another one with his wife to replace
the paper calendar on their fridge so that they can keep track of what
plans they have when scheduling new ones. He is totally psyched about
this use! 2. Workshop sign ups - I have grown weary of trying to
explain how wikis can be used to various groups, so rather than
explain, I have increasingly begun using them. I have started a series
of Lunch n Learn sessions for central office administrators (and any
other central office staff) on web 2.0 tools. Rather than send out in
an email the lust of dates and ask them to respond if they plan to
attend, I created a wiki and asked them to edit the wiki to add their
name beside any date they planned to attend. Do you know I have not
gotten a single complaint about using this method or about how to go
in and add their name? Instead, I have had a few administrators who
were so impressed with this concept they have asked me to help them
set up wikis of their own to do a similar sign up with their own
groups. And we have not even done the session on how to create wikis
yet! I have seen more progress made in a week after modeling the use
of wikis than I have in the past 2 years of trying to explain them to
the same people. 3. Organizing Work - with my technology specialists
and media specialists (we have one of each in every school) I have
been using so many wikis and Google docs, that I needed a place to
organize them all so that they were easy to find rather than digging
through emails. So I created a Google Group for each of these groups
to organize the work we do. Now, rather than have them email various
products to me, I have them post them in the group space. This has
transformed my work significantly. I was getting bogged down in trying
to track who had sent me the products I was asking for and compiling
all of them - it was taking a tremendous amount of time. Now they are
compiling their work for me and it is in one place for me to find - I
love this. 4. Sharing Best Practices - Each month I have the
technology specialists submit a best practice use of technology in
their schools. Again, they would email me the link and then I had to
create a web page and post the info. very time consuming. Now I have
created a wiki that they post the best practice to by the end of each
month. I then send out the wiki link each month to the teachers so
that they can see all the projects going on around the district.

I know this has been one of my longer postings, but in a short amount
of time, I have seen major progress made by using the tools rather
than by evangelizing about them. It reaffirms my belief that teachers
and administrators will not use new tech tools in their work with
others until they have had to use them in their work for others. We
have to become users before we can be leaders.