Leslie Whittington's List: Tech Integration

• It's not enough to fill K-12 classrooms with technology and hope that teachers will embrace the
• new tools and integrate them into their daily lessons.
• Without adequate support and motivation educators wi
• retreat to their old ways of teaching.
• Develop a multifaceted training model for teachers.
• It was broken up into four sessions that were
• two to three hours long and centered on a specific piece of technology
• The sessions comprised live lectures, Q&A sessions, online videos, homework assignments, and even tests that teachers had to take before proceeding to the next segment.
• We hit it from all angles,"
• "The combination approach is working very well."
• Make the technology the incentive.
• teachers the latter had to sign up for and attend at least one related training session. During the training teachers learned how to use the technology,
• "If the teachers didn't attend, they didn't get their
• Take teachers out of their comfort zones
• "We assign technology projects that ensure that our teachers know how to use the equipment for instruction,
• Recently the district equipped teachers with flip video cameras and asked them to show how the equipment could impact student achievement. It didn't take long for the open-ended project to cause frustration among the teachers.
• hey didn't know what we were looking for or what the right answers were," recalled Owens. "But there was no right answer.
• We simply wanted them to use their creativity and find new ways to integrate the technology."
• Re: "school's IT department to develop a district-wide training model." The IT dept seems to have come up with a good model, but who carried out their plan? IT?  I feel strongly, and I believe IT folks might agree, that training and integration of technology should be carried out by people trained for that job, and that is not usually IT because IT training does not usually cover pedagogy and instructional design. IT ends up doing more work when they take this job, when they could be focusing on security, workstations, networks, servers, etc.   People trained in EdTech (educational technology, training, instructional design, pedagogy etc.) need to work in collaboration with IT. IT does the networks, hardware and software, and EdTech folks do the people activities.  This model can be seen slowly working its way to every corner of Higher Education. Campuses more and more have IT working with Academic Technology folks to both support, and train, faculty in the effective use of appropriate technology tools.

17 more annotations...