Technology Department Structure

If you are looking for ideas on what the best model for structuring a technology department looks like, the chart below offers a suggestion on how you might organize the general technology roles at your school.

There are two schools of thought surrounding the separation of the academic technology leader role from the operations technology leader role. Some believe that it is important to keep the two roles separate - as in separate people - in order to enable the two to focus on their intended areas of duty. Others believe that having a central role requiring the knowledge and acumen of both academic and operational technologies enables a more macro management structure. It is important to identify which camp your school will align with. The model provided in this post allows for either to exist.

The roles in the chart can be combined into one person or split into many. It will depend on the size of your school, the number of people available, and their skill sets.

I am happy for comments, as always!Thanks for reading

Thinking Outside of The Box

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Happy New Year! And welcome back to school.

For some of you reading this, you may have come to this epiphany already, but as I was meeting with a teacher this morning, we began to discuss the use of PowerPoint (PPT). Many teachers I know use PPT religiously - for presentations, to distribute content to students, etc. But I find that PPT has many limitations that do not enable it to work nicely in today's education environment. For example, if a teacher using an LMS posts a PPT presentation for students to access, the teacher is assuming that all of their students have PPT installed on their machines and are thus able to view the file. I believe as we move along the education technology trajectory we can no longer feel safe in this assumption. PPT is expensive and PPT is immobile. Both of these factors render the use of this application, well, limiting.

This particular teacher I was meeting with this morning wants to post a series of PPT presentations on the school's Moodle site. When posting to an LMS, I always counsel teachers to think about posting files that are platform-independent, OS-independent, and software-independent: posting files that fit this description enable students to be mobile in their learning, and able to learn on any device they choose. PPT does not fit this description. So, we moved on to thinking of other ways to provide this content for students, outside the confines of a PPT presentation. It then dawned on me: Moodle provides the perfect structure to present (or provide) content for students while remaining true to the concept of platform, OS, and software -independence.

My out-of-the-box epiphany is that a PPT presentation can be broken apart and presented to students in bundles of material. Imagine, if you will, that a PPT presentation is a closed, opaque box filled with information you would like to give to a student. In order for the student to be able to see the information, he or she must open the box and he or she must have the exact tool required to open it. If the student does not have access to the tool, he or she will not have access to the information. Furthermore, if the student would like to quickly access a piece of the information, he or she would have to sift through all of the contents of the box to pull out only what is needed. In a world where we break open the box and make the content accessible regardless of tools available and reveal the topics of the content openly, students have a much better experience with the content and accessing the information. To achieve this, a video can be pulled out of an original PPT presentation, to be followed by a set of reflective questions one of the presentation slides may have contained, but now in the form of a quiz, complete with instant feedback from the teacher! This really opens the concept of "presentation" and gives us the opportunity to present anything, not just the elements that a rigid software application like PPT restricts us to.

So, the teacher and I have decided to conduct this experiment. We will take a more complex, mutli-media rich presentations and blow it apart to create an LMS experience that will provide more flexibility for both the teacher and the student. I am looking forward to this and anticipate that it will open me up for future epiphanies to come!

Thanks for reading!

Two Other Projects for the Year

Interestingly enough I left off two other major projects I'll be working on this year. First is our conversion to a new student information system. We decided last year to go with Veracross as our SIS and the implementation begins now. Our initial meeting with the project management team was last week. This should be interesting.
Second, I am taking a course with the Online School for Girls called Charting a Direction for Your School: Online Learning. This is basically a year-long course that will help school leaders determine a course for implementing online learning into the fabric of the school. I expect this to be an incredible learning experience and fully expect to increase my knowledge base about online education.

The one-on-one meetings with teachers have been progressing fabulously! I admittedly was initially skeptical that teachers would want to be obligated to a class period with the technology integrator one day per week, but I am happy to say that I have been pleasantly surprised by not only the response to the time commitment but also the desire to learn! Many teachers come to the meeting with lists of topics and questions they'd like to cover, and others are so very open to learn what they don't know to ask about. One-to-one instruction has always been a part of the total technology integration model, but I have not experienced it to this magnitude before now. The time required of me to be able to meet with everyone has been considerable. I have begun to consolidate meeting times by scheduling a least two teachers in one period and with the plan of possibly alternating each appointment every other week. In the off-weeks, the intention is that the teachers will work on projects and goals we've set up together either on their own or with another teacher partner. Currently, we are still in the start-up stage and in the process of establishing the goals and projects.

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The iPad program is expanding almost exponentially! We have added three library skills classes to the "pilot" and will soon make an all-school announcement that the iPads are available for any class if they are available. Additionally, we are adding 5 new iPads to enable more teachers to get their hands on one to explore and consider for their curriculum. Because there is one set of iPads that students share, we needed to establish some standardization of the organization for the iPads. I created a "page" for each subject area and placed the app icons in the same locations on each iPad. This way students will basically know where to go on the iPad to locate the apps they need regardless of the specific device they pick up. With the announcement of the iPad mini last week, perhaps we will test a few of those out in the near future to see how they fit in our environment.

Welcome Back to School!

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Welcome back to school! Yes, it has been anywhere from five to nine weeks since school started, depending on what region of the country you are in, but things have been so busy that I am only now able to stop long enough to post! The summer was busy with developing processes for maintaining the backend technology at my school as well as developing a strong teacher training program, reviewing and evaluating the results of the previous school year's initiatives, and determining a process for creating a vision for technology for the school. As usual, the summer went by quickly and here we are: five weeks into the new school year.

An Update

My previous posts have included the mention of an iPad Pilot Program. I would like to offer a "report" of how that initiative fared.

We began the initiative with 15 iPads for an eight grade science class with as many students. The teacher of this class was very diligent about the use of iPads in her curriculum and made sure that it was the central tool for her course. The students used many science-specific apps like Pig Dissection, Chem Lab, and Quiz Chemistry, as well as some productivity and creation apps like Explain Everything and Evernote. I sat in on many classes and was witness to the excitement the students exuded when producing video explanations of the parts of the body or a chemical reaction. In the end, the pilot was a success. All of the 15 iPads we began with are still with us and in great condition! We used the ASVPP with one Apple ID so we still have all of the apps used last year to continue to use with this year's eight grade science class. In addition to continuing the Science 8 initiative, our middle school French teacher has been added and we are now exploring expanding the program to 6 more classes. We have graduated our classroom-sized pilot into a middle school pilot. A new adventure for a new school year.

Posts to come

I plan to continue to report on our iPad program this year. I am certain there will be a lot to learn from it. We have also begun a new initiative surrounding teacher development. The school administration has decided that integrating technology and supporting teachers as they learn to do this is so important that time has been allocated on their weekly schedule to devote to this endeavor. I have been meeting with every teacher weekly (our faculty is small enough for me to - barely - do this) to work on developing their technology and integration skills and knowledge. Again, I am certain there will be much to learn from this endeavor and I plan to update this blog with the progress. A third major project this year is the work of establishing a technology vision for the school. This is an exciting step forward as we think about and mold the future of our school.

So, please continue to read and I hope that you can glean something useful from the posts. As always, please share your comments, thoughts, and questions with me and other readers. Discussion is always welcome!

Thanks for reading!



Links to apps mentioned in this post:
Pig Dissection
Chem Lab
Quiz Chemistry
Explain Everything
Evernote

Tweeting with Teens

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Last week we held an assembly for all of the high school students about digital citizenship. I was very concerned about the presentation being too formal and stodgy so I wanted to find a way to make it more interactive. I began to consider the use of cell phones as a means for the students to communicate with the presentation, each other, and with me, the presenter. Because the presentation was very short and packed with a lot of content, I needed to provide the students with a method of asking questions and offering comments during the presentation. Two possibilities emerged: texting and tweeting. One morning in homeroom several weeks before the presentation I took an informal show-of-hands poll to determine if the students had Twitter accounts, and if they were actively tweeting via their cell phones. Enough of the students appeared to meet these requirements so I decided on tweeting.

I set up a hashtag (#PCSCyberliving) and used Twitterfall to aggregate and display the tweets during the presentation. I had a regular backchannel going! Technically, all worked well. I had a prepared Keynote presentation for the content and I periodically switched between the presentation and Twitterfall to field questions, highlight comments, and to publicly acknowledge the backchannel. I had a teacher serve as the "monitor" of the Twitter feed, so as I focused on presenting the material, she focused on making sure the Twitter feed was under control. She also posted links and resources that went along with the presentation. In the future, I would really like to have someone serve as a commentator in addition to moderator. That way anyone not attending the presentation but following the feed can also follow along with the crux of the presentation. All of the technology elements worked well and I found no issues using Twitter to make my presentation more interactive.

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Socially, well that's another story! As expected the Twitter resolution was used for both good and mischief! (I was dealing with high school students after all!) Most students offered thoughtful and appropriate comments and questions, but there were at least two students that insisted on using the feed as an opportunity to play class clown. This is why the moderator was so important, as well as my announcement at the beginning of the presentation that I would be displaying the feed periodically to the audience. I hoped that these two factors would deter students from indulging in bad behavior. Overall it worked. The moderator had to send one or two direct messages to students that got out of hand and her intervention seemed to quell the behavior. I think that given the subject of the presentation - digital citizenship - the Twitter resolution was a perfect lesson by doing. There was even a student out sick that day who participated in the Twitter feed.


If you think about employing this technique I strongly recommend you do - whether it be for a big presentation or in a classroom. It is an excellent way to encourage and enable students to use technology in a more academic way, if they are not already. It also provides teachers an opportunity to see how this technique can be used in a classroom setting. And it gives students an opportunity to practice good behavior using technology while under the guidance of adults. I'd say it's a win-win-win solution!


Feel free to email me or comment below with questions or share your own experience!


Thanks for reading!


Tech Tools Referenced:
Twitterfall http://twitterfall.com/
Twitter http://twitter.com
Keynote http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/

The [Instructional Technology] Age-Old Question: How do we train our teachers?

Having been in the profession of technology in schools and curriculum for 7 years now, I have sort of developed an opinion about what does and does not work when it comes to how I get my teachers trained in the technologies we need to use. There are a variety of approaches my colleagues and I across the nation engage in regularly: one-to-many lecture style trainings, one-to-one individual meetings, small groups, faculty champions or department leaders, and even online asynchronous trainings!

One method that I strongly feel does not work is any iteration of the technology workshop. That would be the likes of 'Wired Wednesday', 'Tech Tuesday', or 'Monday Tech Madness'. Now, I am open to suggestions and open to continue to try this method if I can find cases where it has worked. This openness has led me to my latest version of the technology workshop: 'Lunch & Laptops'. I am trying one more time (at the strong urging of my head of school) to put in place this method of instructing teachers. I'm thinking of it as sort of my office hours when teachers know they can always find me available to answer questions or help with a skill. I am also holding one session per week after school (Though a clever name for this session has eluded me! Any suggestions?!). I only started this last week and this week is the end of the quarter, so, of course, attendance has been low (three sessions => three students). 

This brings me back to the question in the title: How do we train our teachers? I've attended several conferences and special interest group meetings and spoken to my professional network about the topic, and as anyone reading this in the profession knows, we don't yet have an answer! Especially in the schools where leadership has not made the training a requirement for the teachers or attached some sort of accountability. If you have discovered the recipe, please share with the rest of us! In the meantime, I will give my latest creation a solid try and hope that I can raise the bar for myself in my marketing and cajoling skills and get the chairs filled!