I just spent the most amazing week with a group of awesome teachers and professionals. It gives me hope for traditional schools when I meet teachers like this. I always hear the horror stories from my students about teachers calling them failures or even worse names. I could never imagine any of the people in our group giving up on a child. There was so much passion and concern for the students in each of our classrooms that I left feeling more inspired to become an even better teacher than ever before.
The Emerging Instructional Technologies class at UNI with Dr. Z has been by far the hardest class I have ever taken in my college career. It wasn't hard because I was learning all new material or had a lot of reading or writing to do; it was hard because it stretched me as a teacher and gave me a plethora of new and exciting ideas for may classroom that I want to implement right now. A part of me wishes that school was beginning so I could just start and the other part is relieved that I have summer to do all the preparing and planning for the next school year. This is where the bargaining begins. Now that I know all this cool stuff we can do in the classroom and am part of some exciting global organizations I want time to train all the WCC staff on the awesome things they can do in their classroom and I want them to leave this training confident that they can do it. That is going to take "TIME," something that I do not get a lot of when it comes to staff development.
I have decided to ask my principal for a full day of training during one of the teacher work days before the start of school. It is my goal to get a half day, but since I am bargaining, I am going to start with the dream. How cool would it be to get a full day for 12 teachers to sit in a room and learn all the technologies that I learned this week? I hope that with this training I can help them to feel comfortable with the new technology they will be using as well as leave with goals and ideas for the school year.
I also plan on buying at least a class set of web cams so students can make 1:1 Skype calls. We are already very fortunate to have Lumens document cameras in our classroom that also work as web cameras so we can Skype as a class, but this is connected to my teacher computer and not accessible to students on an individual basis.
Glad to hear that you were "stretched" in class, Carrie. Sounds like you have big plans for the coming year. Remember that you don't want to dazzle them with technology in your 1/2 day workshop. You might want to pick two technologies (i.e., blogging and Skype) and introduce them in the context of specific classroom applications.
ReplyDeleteSkype some important people into your session. Find people who will mean something to your teachers. Collude with a couple of teachers to find someone who will have meaning to your curriculum.
Share your blog. Have your principal begin a blog. Get a small group of teachers to begin their blogs over the summer and try to build the blogosphere that we have in our EIT group.
Good luck and I hope that you are successful. Remember that it is more productive to facilitate evolution instead of revolution in education. It is a matter of changing culture.
Z
http://drzreflects.com
I really hope you get that full day, Carrie!
ReplyDeleteSara
Thanks for the advice Dr. Z! I will do that! I already wowed them last year when I introduced Skype to them as part of their initial training with their new document cameras; we skyped my cousin living in England. It was so fun!! It at least made them want it in their classroom, but getting them to use it is the other thing.
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