ISTE+Standard+V+Reflection

ISTE Standard V: Productivity and Professional Practice

In fundamental ways, technology has become the engine that drives professional practice. From student activities to data tracking and analysis to curriculum development, technology applications offer methods and resources to increase the speed and range of productivity (Williamson & Redish, 2009, pp. 102-103). However, the connections between function and process do not always leap up to greet educators, particularly with resources that have been created for different styles of application (p. 103). I developed a fair amount of skill in a range of productivity tools for personal use; even so, it has been at times challenging to adapt applications to the more narrow specifications and more restrictive guidelines. Moreover many districts, like my own, contract to purchase very specialized software that is designed for educational use, and these applications are even less compatible with other productivity products. It is incumbent, then, on a technology facilitator to find commonalities between applications and highlight not only an application’s functionality and compatibility, but also its simplicity and intuition, called “contextualization” (p. 104). Contexualization is essentially the centerpiece of my role on campus as an informal technology facilitator. Our school district requires a number of professional development hours concentrated on technology, but virtually none of this time is committed to creating connections between various tools in order to increase productivity. I begin where the district’s professional development ends, offering small-scale training and collaboration to give a face to the resource in their classrooms. As an example: last spring my school district transferred all email function from Novell to Microsoft Office. Each staff member in the district received a two-hour training in April or May, only a few short weeks before the start of summer. When we returned to school in the fall, an informal survey of my colleagues revealed that many had not come away from their spring professional development with more than a rudimentary understanding of Office functionality. I chose to start simply with some review of the calendar function and the organization of email groups in Outlook 2007. As our campus worked through the laborious development of new professional learning communities, enormously complex intervention schedules, and the addition of four new sections, the ability to utilize functions like group invitations and calendar sharing dramatically reduced the confusion and miscommunication that can come from so much information moving through so many portals. With the early success of our informal training with Microsoft Office, my technology integration professional learning community came back together to discuss our most significant opportunities for teacher learning on campus this year; as a result, we planned to focus our energies on short-term learning opportunities that have immediate “take-away” value (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007). This plan supported the adult learning theory concept that adults “learn better from active construction knowledge through solving problems or producing products with peers than they do from passive, traditional modes of instruction” (National Staff Development Council, as cited in Williamson & Redish, p. 107). My campus principal approved our overall plan for more targeted professional development along with ongoing follow-up opportunities for the campus as a strategy in line with our comprehensive needs assessment (Schellhorn, 2010). We began working with the integration of our new SMART Response system ‘clickers’. When they first arrived on campus, my ‘clickers’ stayed in the box for four months. It is a fact of which I am not proud, but that confession serves as a powerful counterpoint to my campus’ current usage of the interactive whiteboard response systems. I had been given the response system almost as an afterthought: they arrived approximately 8 weeks into the school year with no prior notice, no training, not even a driver CD, as the driver was in the suite of network programs. I do not consider myself either particularly risk-averse or particularly slow to adapt to new technology; however, this just seemed so unimportant to my district, I couldn’t seem to drum up the wherewithal to start from scratch. Even after my curiosity overwhelmed me and I pulled them out for the first time, I would definitely have qualified as an “infrequent user”, a teacher who not only uses the technology rarely, but focuses on only a narrow range of its potential uses; that of summative evaluation (Penuel, Crawford, DeBarger, Boscardin, Masyn, & Urdan, 2005). It was only after a reading of Standard V (Williamson & Redish, 2009, pp. 101-109) that I considered how many other options were available to me and to my colleagues. Incidentally, I finally managed to enroll in a district professional development for use of the response system remotes. I came away with more technical knowledge of the system and the accompanying software and even more frustration about how to make the system an authentic part of instruction and of dynamic formative assessment. (University of Minnesota Office of Classroom Management, 2009). So, I began to dig: I looked on the online lesson exchange that supports our district resources, I floated around discussion forums, and at long last, I spent real time with the software. Over the course of the following weeks, I returned to an important truth known by researchers and classroom teachers alike: technology professional development focused seamless instructional integration has broad power in committing teachers to regular use of that resource (Penuel, Crawford, DeBarger, Boscardin, Masyn, & Urdan, 2005). Put simply, convince a teacher that her students are the better for it, and she will use the remotes. Additionally, showing teachers the simplicity of creating data graphs for each question opened a new avenue of pursuing real-time continuous improvement in the form of either survey or assessment data. When I conducted the professional development for the response system, I highlighted exactly how teachers could utilize the graphing function for data tracking and made sure that attendees came away with a usable template. Between the first session and the second, eight new teachers used the response system, and six new teachers came to the training. Not only did the practicality of the resource resonate with the staff, the commonality of purpose created the beginnings of a dynamic professional learning community (Armstrong, Barnes, Sutherland, Curran, Mills, & Thompson, 2005, pp. 467-468).

References:

Armstrong, V., Barnes, S., Sutherland, R., Curran, S., Mills, S., & Thompson, I. (2005). Collaborative research methodology for investigating teaching and learning: The use of interactive whiteboard technology. //Educational Review// //, 57// (4), 457-469. Penuel, W., Crawford, V., DeBarger, A., Boscardin, C., Masyn, K., & Urdan, T. (2005). //Teaching with student response system technology: A survey of k-12 teachers//. Retrieved 5 2011, May, from SRI International: [] Pitler, H., Hubbell, E. R., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). //Using technology with classroom instruction that works.// Alexandria, VA, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. University of Minnesota Office of Classroom Management. (2009, March 25). //Student response systems overview//. Retrieved May 5, 2011, from University of Minnesota: [] Williamson, J., & Redish, T. (2009). //ISTE's Technology Facilitation and Leadership Standards: What Every K-12 Leader Should Know and Be Able to Do.// Washington: International Society for Technology in Education.