Moving Towards Tech Integration and Students as Contributors of Content

We are making progress. In the past, my colleague and I wrote a semester tech plan and brought it to the staff. Most teachers approved it as written. A few would ask us to work on other projects with them.

This term, I am meeting with each of my teachers to create a semester plan. In most cases, this isn't the deep, rich collaboration I envision since my class provides them with prep time, but it is a good start given time constraints. It means I no longer have every class in a grade level on approximately the same lesson. I'm looking at 15 potentially unrelated preps a week, but since I was a classroom teacher for 11 years, I'm used to far more preps a week than that.

None of this would be possible without the teachers being willing to work with me. They each either gave up a prep time or met with me after school. This may not sound like much, but our school is a fast-paced place and they are all involved in many projects, meetings and conferences beyond their regular planning for lessons and assessing their students. With so many tasks competing for their time, I am appreciative of their generosity.

I'm happy that what I'm doing with the students is more closely integrated with the classroom curriculum, and that this process allows me to help the teachers see ways to teach with technology. In some of our plans, they will book time beyond my class to work on the projects. Other teachers will team teach with me some of the time. For other classes, the entire plan is contained in my weekly class.

Ideally, I want to move towards the type of integration and collaboration that Kim Cofino blogged about here>and here. That change requires a different staffing model. My principal has made a staffing request for next year, but their are many competing requests so we will have to wait and see if it is funded for next year.

As happy as I am with the progress made, I keep mulling over the words of one of my teachers. As we finished the semester plan, she lamented that it wasn't very Web 2.0. She attended the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai last year and embraced the need for teaching 21st century skills instead of the old consumer model of information.

She's right. While many of the semester plans do allow students to create content, show their learning in new ways that involve higher-order thinking, there is not much connection with the rest of the world. Except for a few YouTube videos and VoiceThreads, there isn't much in these plans that connect our students with the world outside of our school. Does there need to be in an international school where the children are sitting in class each day with other international children? Does there need to be at the elementary level where so much of what we do with technology is still new to them?

My first response is, "Of course!" However, I need to think more about the whys and hows. If you are using Web 2.0 tools to connect your elementary students with the larger community, what drives you? Why do you personally think it is import? I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Excellent Webcast on New Literacies by Allan Luke

This morning, I was fortunate enough to be online when Jo McLeay Twittered about finding a webcast by Allan Luke focusing on New Literacies. I had never heard of Allan Luke before, but now I'll be seeking out more information. The web cast really made me think-- and that is not an easy thing to do on Sunday mornings. Not ready to write about it, need to keep chewing on it in my head.

A Vision of Students Today

Michael Wesch has done it again, and done it well.




He's a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University and he created this video with his students. Or maybe I should say that his students created it with him, since it came out of a Google Doc worked on by all 200 of them. Like his previous video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, he shows some of the implications of Web 2.0.

At the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai, Will Richardson encouraged us to look at conversations outside of education to inform our practice and help us envision the needed changes. He made me realize how much of what I read has been written by classroom teachers, which is good, but limiting.

Being a cultural anthropologist, Michael Wesch brings a different perspective to the issue of 21st Century Literacy. For example, in "The Machine is US/ing Us", he starts out showing how digital text is different than printed text and then goes on to show the implications of that, how it has changed and is changing the world. By the end, he is pushing us to reconsider key definitions of copyright, and even family.

This new video is yet another push that I need to start making changes. I do all this reading and thinking, but not much acting. I was much more constructive and progressive as a classroom teacher than I am as a technology coordinator. Part of that is due to the tremendous learning curve I went through last year working in a new school in a new country on a platform new to me. Part of it is working in such a large school. As a classroom teacher, I could still close my door and move ahead on my own, if need be. Now I am a coordinator trying to move 50+ teachers and more than 800 students forward.

Those are all valid excuses, but they are still excuses. As I get a better handle on this job, one of my obstacles now is empathizing too much with the classroom teachers. They are so stressed, always working so hard, that I am loathe to add more to their load. I too clearly remember the heavy feeling of not being able to add one more thing to my schedule without imploding.

When I was a classroom teacher, I turned to tech in part because it made my job easier, and also because I was finding it the most effective way to make the curriculum more engaging and meaningful. When I was a technology integration specialist in Malaysia, with some teachers I was able to share this vision, help them move along. I think most would did so would admit that it didn't exactly make their job easier, but it was such a powerful learning tool that it was worth the effort. [I find it interesting that the projects I created with them were much richer, more worthwhile than the projects I did as prep activities. All I can say is that I was new to the job and kept teaching the outcomes, even though the outcomes were too skills based.]

So, it looks like my challenge this year, is to keep pondering the messages of Michael Wesch, Karl Fisch's "Did You Know?", and Kim Cofino's definition of 21st Literacy Century, to make me passionate enough about all of this that I DO feel justified in adding on to the teacher's burdens. Hopefully I'll find a way to keep it from being a burden to them. Either way, that's my job. I'd better get to it!


Thanks to Bud Hunt for Tweeting about it. (How exactly, should we credit Tweet sources? It there an APA citation format for Twitter yet?)