Welcome to "Ask the Tech Coach," a podcast for Instructional Coaches and Technology Integration Specialists.
In this episode of “Ask the Tech Coach),” Jeff and Nick discuss how a school district can set a vision for digital learning in the classrooms and how you can start that conversation with your administrative team and instructional coaching department.
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This week’s question is:
Question Topic: How can we get the entire school district on the same page when it comes to defining what digital learning looks like in the classroom?
- **Developing a Shared Vision and Goals**
- How do you create a shared vision?
- Asking … “what’s the purpose?”
- Where is the target?
- What is the objective?
- What do we want our staff to get out of the training … and why?
- How can we provide the training and experiences to get staff able to meet the goals
- Who is included in this conversation?
- Superintendent
- Cabinet
- District / Building Leaders
- Teachers
- Students
- Parents / Community Members
- Ways to ask the important questions
- Google Form
- Conversations
- Quick Survey’s
- What has or is working well?
- Have your goals/objectives been meet?
- Using the Summertime to ask questions of district leaders
- Map out and Diagram a full year program
- How do you build a catalogue to support the goals and objectives of the district and building leaders
- **Prioritizing Professional Learning in and out of your district**
- Creating a Professional Development Yearly Overview
- Send out a document to the staff so they are on the same page
- Here are the goals that we are looking to progress
- Create a catalogue of professional learning opportunities
- Internal
- Meeting Speakers
- Consultants
- External
- Conferences
- EdCamps
- Thrive
- Sage
- Health Organizations / Hospitals often run sessions
- Using a Newsletter to support professional Learning
- Work with your building administrators to put professional development information in THEIR newsletters
- **Creating a digital learning evaluation method that is flexible yet effective**
- Have a variety of evaluation methods … not just the mid-year and end of year evaluations
- Keep evaluation more informal and collegial so that it’s not a “gotcha”
- Using a Staff Survey (Self-Assessment) to allow teachers to share what they know and what they would like to learn during the year
- Use some type of “artifact creation” when it comes to digital learning so that teachers can showcase what they are learning throughout the professional development process
- At the end of the day, the teacher is going to have to show that they know how to use the tool or that they understand the concept.
- Allow for feedback and professional conversations around the topic and concept that is backed up by Instructional Coaches
- Create an online discussion board so that staff members can collaborate and learn from each other
- **Providing constant support for students, teachers, and community members**
- Creating a Student led “genius bar” or Tech Team
- Invite the students to run their own professional learning sessions for teachers (Students teaching teachers)
- How to use specific apps
- How to create projects that students already love doing and share it with more teachers
- Students teaching Board of Education members how to use Google Apps (sharing, formatting, etc)
- **Protecting student privacy and promoting digital safety**
- Digital Citizenship: Create a unified and tiered curriculum that supports the knowledge of but, also includes resources to support parents so that they are understanding what students are learning in school.
- Create a Dashboard in a Google Site that has a spreadsheet of all of the district used tools so that parents know what programs are holding content about their students.
- Include the privacy policy
- Include the paid/free status
- Include how to remove student information if parents are not interested in having student information available.
- **Working together with parents so students learn both in and out of the classroom**
- Parent Nights
- Short form
- Single subject events
- Parent University
- Build a curriculum of learning that follows a theme
- **Embracing and Celebrating the Impact Digital Learning has on students, teachers, and community.**
- Share the “wins” of staff and students
- Success breeds success
- If people see that it’s working for others, they might believe they can do it too
- Post in newsletters, and (maybe) social media examples of what is happening in the classroom and share it with others
- Get your staff to present their win’s to other staff members
- Ask “how does this information get back to the students and their successes?”
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