Instructional Technology – Page 2

Category: Instructional Technology (page 2 of 2)

Your Standards or Mine?

Chris O’Neal will join us this Monday for the SOS podcast. We will

discuss the Essential Question of whether or not we need standards for technology as a subject area. If technology integration is the process of finding ways where technology can help teachers of math, science, music, etc., reach their subject area standards, then the answer seems pretty straightforward.

Thus, it doesn’t seem that we need standards for technology. Yet, we need to ask ourselves where we hope the technology will take us. As discussed in the SOS podcast, we want our schools to shift from a 20th-century learning focus to what EduBloggers term “21st Century Learning”.

These 21st-century learning skills need standards and benchmarks that, just like the technology, need to be integrated into all curriculum areas of our schools.

Three years ago, we went through the process of reviewing and refining our technology standards at my old school, HKIS. From the start, a team of teachers, instructional technologists, librarians, and administrators looked at learning rather than technology tools to drive our committee work. After months of research and discussion, we came up with the “Information and Communication Literacy” standards and benchmarks that focused, as the name implies, totally on the handling and communication of various forms of information.

What drove home the point that technology is just a tool to support learning is that we spent only one moment in standard creation or the dreaded wordsmithing. We adopted the forward-thinking “Academic” standards and benchmark another committee had created! They already had begun bringing 21st-century thinking skills into our curriculum by making them the learning outcomes for all our academic efforts.

The Design Process

April 23, 2008 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Jeffrey Sachs was a guest on the NPR “Science Friday” last week, where he continued the conversation on how he believes we can eliminate poverty worldwide. He focused on how technological advances will help us deal with economic growth and pollution. Sachs spoke about how we use research and design to develop programs to deal with problems worldwide. He shared his process for designing solutions to problems that he termed “RDDD,” which reminded me of instructional technologists’ design work.

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On a side note, a terrific book that reviews studies of efforts to go into communities worldwide to bring about change by groups like the Peace Corps, UN agencies, etc., is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. It was a textbook in one of my graduate courses that consistently reminded the reader just how difficult it is to bring about change and have it diffuse through a community. 🙂

As an instructional technologist working with teachers to design curriculum, I follow a model similar to Sachs’ that starts with Understanding. I work to understand the teacher’s and student’s needs and the specific learning outcomes the teacher aims for. The next step after gathering the needed information, which sometimes includes observation and working with the students by teaching the Information and Communication Literacy (ICL) curriculum, is to Analyze the information from an instructional and assessment viewpoint. Research comes into play by seeing what other teachers did with the lesson in the past and by checking my Web resources to see how lessons posted there could help design this one. I then Develop the lesson with the teacher or adapt what they already have in place. The teacher then implements the lesson, or we team teach it if ICL skills are involved and the teacher wants the support. We then Evaluate and Refine the lesson for future use. I remember this process, Understand-Analyze-Research-Develop-Implement-Evaluate-Refine (UARDIER), by appreciating my teaching partner with the phrase “You are dear!”.

Sach’s model, Research-Develop-Demonstrate-Diffusion (RDDD), adds the final “D” for Diffusion, which happens when classroom lessons are designed where the assessment data shows real student learning. Word gets out to fellow teachers, and the instructional and assessment strategies spread from one classroom to another.

Looking at the bigger picture of planning professional development programs, the key word is plan. This means getting instructional leaders on the PD development team who know how to design programs that originate from the needs of the teachers and students. As I have posted before, PD that works happens consistently weekly on one and in trim collaborative grade level or department teams once a learning community is created. The more we can individualize to personalize each teacher’s needs and desires, the better.

One-shot quarterly PD days, non-differentiated, for all the teachers at once, usually involving just direct instruction, can sometimes do more harm than good, especially when learning technology skills. Throwing various software and Web 2.0 tools scattershot at a weary group of teachers on a Friday afternoon can lead to their feeling confused and inadequate, which can move into frustration and potentially anger. Yikes!

Adult learners need to bring new learning into the context of their experiences while having the time to practice the new skills to gain comfort and to see if they have practical value. Dr. Sach’s model starts with “Research,” which means connecting to the users and getting to know their needs. While Dr. Sach’s acronym might be shorter than the one I follow, our two models have much in common.

How to Shift?

April 6, 2008 / David Carpenter / 1 Comment

This week, the Shifting Our School podcast will tackle the essential question of “How to shift?”. Our previous shows with other EQs delved into discussions that connected this overriding theme to our podcast. So, it is time to combine some thoughts from practical experience.

Brent Loken, the Director of Curriculum and Innovation at Hsinchu International School (HIS), will be our guest for the show. He will offer details about one approach to helping schools make the shift to focusing on the learning of 21st-century skills, constructivist learning instructional strategies, and the variety of interpretations of what School 2.0 can look like. Brent and the leadership team of Grant Ruskovich, Ken Willis, and Catherine Chen took a top-down leadership-driven approach, working with the school board, parents, students, and faculty to define what they wanted their school to be about. This “about” happens to be a significantly shifted school.

As an instructional technologist working under more “normal” conditions with pockets of shifted teachers and often non-committed Leadership towards shifting to School 2.0, I will share some of the practices that I found helpful to move a school I previously worked at to being more shifted. While I list these practices as helpful in guiding a school to Learning 2.0 outcomes, they are accepted strategies familiar to our schools. They can be standard practice in managing organizations.

Administrative Leadership: Despite numerous reasons, administrators can find it challenging to commit to all the change and transition that goes with shifting a school. We must have the administrators at the helm if we are to shift our schools. Our last SOS podcast for the school year in June will look into what barriers administrators face in bringing about change in their schools. As this is a massive topic on its own, I won’t comment further and ask that if anyone is reading this post, tune into our podcast with Brent Loken to hear one leader provide the vision and action steps that administrators can take to shift their schools.

Conversation-Listening-Designing-Action-ASSESSMENT: Deciding where a school community wants to go should start with conversations around the question, “What is learning?”. Additional questions are: What does it look like? What skills will our graduating students have? What will they need to be able to do to be global citizens in an unpredictable world? What is teaching? We can then use the UbD backward process to develop our program plan, action steps, and accountability protocols. This relates to a personal discussion with educators about their teaching philosophy.

Time, along with care and attentive listening, is needed as we grow our learning community and validate one another. Most of us as educators are at some point involved in strategic or other program-building plans. We worked with parents, teachers, administrators, and sometimes students to decide what our mission should be and what outcomes we want our students to attain from our schools. These development processes have documented procedures to find the “how to” steps quickly. I cannot value enough the importance of listening, real attentive listening, which can lead to proper understanding and help move the process along.

Planning comes into play, along with action steps to put all the hard work into action in our classrooms. The part of the process that I find left out for numerous reasons is accountability. This is another huge topic that deserves a great deal of attention. I will say here that if a school is to shift to whatever goals it sets, one needs to take all that energy from the start of the development process to the action and assessment stages. We must answer, “Are we reaching our goals?” and adapt accordingly. Accountability is key.

Defining, Discussing, and Understanding of School/Learning 2.0: This practice ties into the planning process of a school community’s programs. Plenty of charts, posts, and articles contrast what and how we teach with a 20th-century approach to the potential 21st-century version. The Framework for 21st Century Skills website lists the skills, and now, the Route 21 education section provides a terrific place to start the education and understanding effort with one’s school community. The next step is to define what Web 2.0 tools with their strange names do for the learning community without any expectations for learning or using them.

Work to take away the lack of understanding. As an instructional technology program develops around individual and team (i.e., elementary grade level teams, middle school teams & high school departments) needs, you can design a differentiated learning program based on those individual and group adult learning needs in your school’s learning network.

Time: This is usually a top-of-the-list issue at any organization. We often need to build in the time or the procedures to follow through on our plans, making the work that goes with shifting our schools an additional task added to overloaded teachers’ workloads. Time must be structured for the activities that go into the shifting process, taking away other items from teachers’ plates and giving them time during the school day to focus on the shifting. The shifting process needs a great deal of time, as in years, to go from the conversation to the designing to the implementation to the assessment phase.

Focus: I wrote about this in a recent post. We put in a lot of time writing our strategic plans, mission statements, etc., but then stray from them, leaving less time and energy to do what we say we will. My experience with international schools is that they sometimes need to focus on how to use their time after the planning stops. Check out the post, as this also connects to administrative Leadership.

Less is More, Especially with Depth: If we stay focused on what we say we want to do, there will be less on everyone’s plates; thus, we will have a better chance of reaching our goals—common sense. Don’t try to be everything to everyone as a school. Shifted schools live by the mantra, “How does any new program or initiative connect to our strategic plan and mission?” This gets back to administrative Leadership. “No” is not a four-letter word! Our leaders connected to our community learning networks gather lots of information and dialogue and then can make decisions that keep our plates less full and our lives more balanced. We will talk in a future SOS podcast about why such a common sense idea gets dropped by many schools.

Trained Change Agents & Designers: Today, library media specialists and instructional technologists receive particular coursework in designing new programs and implementing them. They also gain skill sets from their graduate programs that support their being able to be 21st-century learners just like we want our students to be. By staying on top of the latest research and continually learning from their PLNs, they have the knowledge and skills to be the on-the-ground leaders who help guide our schools through the change and transition process. Support and empower them to do what they are trained to do.

It might be uncomfortable for some schools to face. Still, old-style technology coordinators, focusing on hardware and networks, have been replaced with today’s instructional/educational technologists who are teachers first, grounded in instructional theory, working to bridge the technology to the teachers and students in the classrooms. We have technicians and network engineers to handle the hardware and repair issues.

With their training and skill sets, the library media specialists guide our teachers and students in the multiple literacies that our 21st-century learners (students, teachers, and administrators) must work with and master to be adaptable and flexible learners. They must be something other than the 20th-century librarian focused on reading literacy and building book collections. They must be leaders and partners in designing and implementing curriculum.

By working as partners with teachers and administrators in the curriculum development process, these two instructional leaders work to support the designing of curriculum to reach the learning goals for our 21st-century-focused schools. To see how the HKIS Upper Primary School teachers and specialists designed their curriculum review process, select the following hyperlink to download a copy of an article reviewing their work. HKIS Upper Primary Curriculum Review Model

Education, Communication, Ownership, and Celebration Procedures: Schools must use their communication channels with the community to share progress, build ownership, and celebrate everyone’s efforts as the school works towards its goals. Once schools start making the move to School 2.0, they need to use ongoing parent workshops, community coffees, student forums, newsletters, blogs, etc. to build out the community learning network with a focus on the shifting process. The school needs to be flexible and adaptable with two-way communication from the community. Along the way, celebrate the successes and shine the light on your risk-takers! So often, those willing to stick their necks out to try new things, offer differing opinions and make the shift are isolated and made to feel devalued. Put these leaders’ efforts on your school Web sites, write about them in newsletters, and get their ideas published in journals. These leaders will “own” the process and share their passion. Ownership means accountability and follow-through. Celebrate your early adopters, and they will stick around instead of looking for more shifted pastures. 🙂

Get the Right Crew Onboard: This is a biggie that can be one of the most significant storms to work your voyage through. Going back to the conversations that start the process, everyone will need to decide if they can commit to the shift once they fully understand it. Administrators will need to work with their Human Resource staff to plan over a few years to give folks the opportunity to seek employment at other schools. As uncomfortable as this can be, we must face that organizations change and that individuals should move on if they cannot support our school’s mission. As in baseball, start scouting early and building a wish list of shifted educators you hope to recruit to your school. Something tells me that this is what Fortune 500 companies do. 🙂

The Curriculum Development Process: Being systematic is central to bringing about change. We must build protocols that support a system that scaffolds our efforts to move toward our goals. Sadly, for so many schools, the curriculum review process can be a struggle and an unsupported effort that gets a bad name. A dynamic, well-managed system becomes a natural professional learning community that can drive how we do business in our schools. See the previous link to the HKIS Upper Primary model for more information.

Work with Your Successes: Students are already learning in our classrooms whether you are School 1.0 or 2.0. We, as teachers, use well-thought-out instructional and assessment strategies. Back to the conversations that start the shifting process, we need to assess what we are already doing well by asking questions like:

Which strategies are working really well? Which ones guide our students to our school-wide learning goals? Which ones can easily be enhanced using 2.0 strategies?

As Rick Pierce points out, we need to remind ourselves that change leads to a much more extended transition period that takes us to our goals. This transition is a continuum that we all move along at different rates of speed and comfort levels. So, create a collaborative team including your instructional technologist, library media specialist, administrators, curriculum coordinator, and other interested parties to design an ongoing adult learning program centered on personal learning networks that start within each individual’s comfort zone and experience. Then, take small steps along the continuum towards using shifted classroom instructional strategies and assessments that support your school’s shifted goals.

A quick example is that concept maps and other graphic organizers are used in classrooms worldwide. Teachers are comfortable using them. Students learn by making connections using HOTS as they map out their learning.

The next step for some might be a desktop digital tool like Inspiration or Cmap, while others might be ready to jump to 2.0 and the collaborative power of Mindmeister or Bubbl with 24/7 access to their work. As time passes, the next step is telecollaborative and blended work, where students and teachers make connections outside the school, still using concept maps but sharing them with learners in projects like The Flat Classroom. Remember to start with your current successes and honor the innovative work already getting results as you design each teacher’s shifting experience.

Another obvious point is to make your professional development program connect to your shifting school outcomes in an ongoing, structured learning community that periodically gives learning and connection time during the school day while avoiding the end of quarter one shot; one size fits PD days. Adult learners deserve and need differentiated to personalized instruction along with time to make meaning from their experiences and the opportunity to apply their new learning to give them half a chance for success. And look to work with the professionals within your school who have attended conferences, read leading educational books, and are on top of the edublogosphere to provide ongoing coaching who will be with you every day instead of a consultant’s couple-day visit.

You might go the extra step, adding the depth of an experienced consultant to partner with your teachers by having them stay for weeks or months. Both Hong Kong International School and Hsinchu International School are using this model.

Stick To Your Guns: Much of what I write here is accepted and practical knowledge. If a school community does all of these listed strategies and more, they can feel confident that they are inclusive, transparent, systematic, and focused in their shift. There will still be difficulties and uncomfortable feelings, but LEARNING is all about that. Taking risks is so important!

Everyone from the administrator at the helm to the crew and passengers working together to stay the course while showing the courage to stand by their planning and initial goals is central to the shifting process. This courage sometimes fails, especially when the dreaded “Well, the parents say …” and we as educators forget we are the professionals hired to teach the students and run the school. 🙁

Final Note: As stated at the start, my experience is from working at a non-shifted school without a school-wide initiative or committed Leadership to make the shift. We dug in and did our best as a group of educators working within the system. Brent Loken and Grant Ruskovich took a different tack with their work at HIS. Download the SOS podcast later in the week to hear about their efforts.

Conversations with Jeff

December 9, 2007 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I Skype weekly with Jeff Nugent, the Center for Teaching Excellence associate director at Virginia Commonwealth University. Jeff and I have connections as international educators and from the instructional technology program at the University of Virginia. We share thoughts on our separate but connected worlds of education as we work with our teacher partners to design instruction.

Jeff took The following notes after our last call with my responses.

Jeff- The notion of the “Digital Divide” (in an educational/social context) has been transformed radically, making it more subtle and difficult to detect. It is no longer about access/boxes/wires… it’s about making meaning on the web. It’s about organizing the open web to make it a meaningful learning environment. This means understanding how to connect, create, and participate in meaningful ways with others on the web…it is about participation, exchange, and social interaction. This is NOT a given… Students need to learn how to do this. If they don’t get it at home and they don’t get it at school….they don’t get it….EVER. The divide is subtle, and I fear…expanding.

David- Jamie McKenzie termed the over-purchasing of computers and leaving them with limited teacher training or instructional technology support as a “screen saver disease,” as that is what one often viewed in empty computer labs in American public schools. It was one thing not to use the hardware and newly connected Internet; as Jeff points out, it is now the case that some students are gaining rich learning experiences via teachers and whole schools supporting the building of online learning communities. Others are not.

Besides the learning that takes place in well-structured forums and wikis, online journaling with one’s teacher, and blogging on current events, there is a whole world of various literacies as connected students access online databases, search for visuals to support their ideas, concept map Essential Questions, storyboard learning projects with their teams, choose the right tool to meet their needs- the list goes on and on of what a learning 2.0 environment can offer a student. The skills gained in this environment are transferable to the ones they will use as employers look for students with 21st-century skills.

Jeff- School administrative leaders must be centrally involved, knowledgeable, and concerned about the educational value of the web. As a school principal, you MUST be one of your school’s most savvy web researchers. This means having many of the fundamental understandings that you and I routinely take for granted.

David- Jeff and I spoke briefly about the UVA pre-service teacher training. It was recently celebrated as an innovative program by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. I asked Jeff about what is happening at the Edu Leadership program at VCU as we reacted to a recent post by Jeff Utecht on administrators realizing the value of hiring networked educators. We had the same reaction of administrators probably needing more experience in the blogosphere and understanding what a well-connected teacher blogger can bring to a school. Jeff hit it on the head that administrators need to be the instructional leaders of their schools, which in today’s world means being networked into the benefits of the read/write web.

Jeff- The conversation needs to include school-level leaders (principals, admins.), and I don’t see where this is happening. There is a lot of focus on preparing the individual classroom teacher; however, I need to see Educational Leadership programs in schools of education engaging school leaders in the kind of dialogue/inquiry that results in them taking seriously the radical transformations we are witnessing. I am wondering what the question is that needs to be asked the answer to which results in them saying: “I must engage my faculty and students in this process of understanding, creating, and participating on the web because it is fundamentally transforming all aspects of society…if my students don’t get this here they will emerge from my school disadvantaged.”

David- Jeff ties all our points together nicely in the statement above.

Jeff- I enjoy the dialogue unfolding on the Edu-blogger playing field. However, much of the talk about technology focuses on cool tools and their potential uses in the classroom. This kind of stuff is interesting and of value to some classroom teachers and those of us who promote it and try to make sense of it. At the same time, this stuff is often at too fine a level of granularity to be of central interest to school admins. It rolls off of them like – as my father was fond of saying – “water off a duck’s ass.” There needs to be a more fundamental experience – in their preparation as school leaders – that helps them make the tough decisions about where they stand concerning education technology. They are not ever really encouraged/forced to ask the questions.

David- I will add that I am finding too much “tool talk” in the posts I follow. The leaders in the field need to speak in broad terms to try and entice teachers in professional development settings to try something new. From an instructional technologist’s perspective, our training focuses on the individual needs of the teacher or group of teachers working towards some learning goals for their students. As we partner and work from the teachers’ expertise, our learning community often becomes a rich environment for creativity and new strategies to support student understanding. The tools slowly work their way into the process. It certainly would make a big difference if administrators sat in on those conversations, asking questions about learning outcomes and the best ways to build personal learning environments for the children.

Jeff- When they get into a leadership position, where do principals look for guidance about the role IT should play in the school? How should it be used? Who is in charge? Who decides? More often than not, they offload this decision to the system admins. (or maybe worse, they have no say). Managing boxes and wires and securing the network – have little to nothing to do with decisions about the meaningful and powerful uses of technology in education… Yet, at the same time, this has everything to do with it. Locked-down networks become the mental model for understanding how technology should be viewed. They succumb…

David- great point, Jeff. You point to the next step in the evolution of the instructional/educational technologist. I consistently find in my reading of journal articles and blogs that IT/ET is present in many schools in the US and international schools. However, I have not heard of a Director of Educational Technology position until recently. Some schools try to combine the educational role with the technology infrastructure upkeep, just as schools once tried to do the same with computer and printer repairs for the Technology Coordinator and hoped they had some time to work on the educational side.

The International School of Bangkok is advertising a Director of Educational Technology now. This individual will be the go-to person at that school, along with the Curriculum Director, when the administrator needs big-picture advice and guidance to support learning. One can only hope that more schools follow ISB’s leadership to separate the need for educational technology and infrastructure leadership into two positions.

What is in a Name? – Part II

December 6, 2007 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I was planning to make this post about a possible new name for those of us in instructional/educational technology, stressing how we are teaching partners focused on student learning. The job title would be “learning specialist.” After speaking to three different people, I am reminded that “learning specialist” is often connected to resource teachers, so it doesn’t quite work.

All three individuals pointed out that while the instructional technologist can help design lessons that only sometimes involve technology, we are the leaders in our schools for using it. I was thinking about removing the term “technology” from the title because it carries so much baggage for many educators. We know the fear factor many feel concerning using technology in general, but there is also the “tech guy” connotation that goes with it as well. Being the “tech guy” often means being the fixer/technician instead of the fellow teacher and learning specialist.

One of the ways I start each school year is to meet with teachers in grade-level teams to refresh their memories of my role and introduce the technicians who support the school network and AV. This has worked with monthly Tech Update blog information sharing about curriculum, instruction, information literacy, and technology infusion. Now that I am moving from a website to a blogging platform to share information, I will use this information conduit to share lessons learned and best practices to further demonstrate my position in the community as a teacher, learning specialist, and technology/information literacy leader.

What is in a Job Title?

December 3, 2007 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Lots. We communicate much about what we do using a job title describing at least a portion of our skill set. When I was at UVA studying instructional technology, our cohort members met several times to discuss how we should title the position a few of us were working towards in K-12 schools. Most group members were getting their doctorates to work in higher education. Still, many would teach pre-service teachers and grad students getting instructional/educational technology degrees. A few members eventually wrote an article about this somewhat new job titled “Technology Integration Specialist.” You can check out the article yourself.

I led a discussion at the recent Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai on the role of the technology integration specialist (or instructional/educational technologist) in our schools. Our task was to develop a job description. It was clear from the 30 attendees that this person is an educational leader within our schools and in no way a technician. I bring up this point as some schools still use the term “technology coordinator” even when the individual is truly an educational technologist, leaving all of the technical concerns of running the network and repairing the hardware to the technicians.

While in graduate school, I researched the technology coordinator title. I discovered schools were taking a break from hiring in-school technicians who tried to work with teachers and students when possible. Administrators realized that they needed trained teachers working to bridge the gap between classroom instruction and the new technologies coming on the scene. The research showed that the technology coordinators usually needed graduate degrees in instructional/educational technology or instruction/curriculum.

They often were individuals who enjoyed working with computers and networks who could step in to help schools, especially during the 1990s when so many funds were going into connecting American public schools to the Internet. Someone needed to manage the networks and expand computer labs.

I will post more on why the title “technology coordinator” sends the wrong information while also sharing my thinking that we instructional technologists might be better named “learning or instructional specialist.” One thing to think about is how often it is an easy out for teachers to say they are uncomfortable with technology, so they hold back from trying new ways of teaching that have nothing to do with technology.

More to come…

Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness