Week 4 Assignment Part 1-Technology Flow Chart

Technology Flow Chart

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Week 4 Assignent Parts 2-3

Action Plan for improving the use of technology in the classroom at Carroll Elementary.

Data Sources

This plan for improvement will utilize information gathered from the following sources:

1. Student and staff interviews

2. STAR chart data

3. The campus improvement plan

4. AWARE data disaggregation software

5. Long Range Plan for technology, 2006-2020

General Goal of Action Plan as Influenced by the above data sources

Information from the above sources indicates that students at Carroll Elementary most need opportunities to use technology as an active creator of meaning. As it is now, the students’ level of interaction is limited to brief passive encounters during the day.

Student and Staff interviews

Students interviewed reported use of technology being regular, frequent, and superficial. Currently, student occasionally use word processing programs. However, the majority of their interaction consists of using math and reading drill software. These students indicated that they understand the basic skills needed to navigate and use computer programs. This indicates that minimal time and resources will need to go into training out students how to use computer. We can focus directly on introducing the new program.

STAR chart data

This data shows steady improvement in all areas of the campus’s level of technology integration. The weakest area though, is the practical implementation of technology in the classroom. It comes down to the fact that our teachers do not have adequate time or training to successfully use technology to improve their students’ education on a higher level than drill software.

Campus improvement plan

The Carroll Elementary 7th goal for campus improvement is to provide students with opportunities to become lifelong learners. As the trend is for more aspects of our lives to become entwined with technology, we can assume that all meaningful programs designed to promote lifelong learning must include an integral use of technology that the student have access to on a regular basis.

AWARE data disaggregation software

Teachers use this software to make a precise and accurate decision concerning how to best help students with their instructional gaps. This means that teachers can determine with student expectation or TEKS each student needs more work on. Our perennial weakness has been the students’ ability to summarize information and determine what information is critical to an issue and what is merely peripheral to the issue or material at hand.

Long Range Plan for technology, 2006-2020

The data presented in the LRPT states that student view the increased level of fun and efficiency when using technology as primary benefits of enhanced use of technology in the classroom. It follows then that students will engage in interactive activities on the internet with great enthusiasm to the benefit of their education.

Action

Based on the data sources listed above which included findings from week 3, my campus could easily implement a system of WIKIs for our students to use. Sheldon ISD already has access to the free WIKI creator program located here. Few, if any, staff members know about this resource. Once teachers are familiar with this application, it would be relatively simple to implement in the classroom. Student would now have the ability to contribute to a common body of student knowledge concerning any topic the teacher wishes for them to study. In the case of the AWARE data sited above, teachers could easily create a WIKI designed to facilitate an ongoing student conversation on summarization and main idea skills.

Professional Development Prerequisites

In order to make the WIKI program a success the teachers will already need to be familiar with our AWARE software. They will need to use this to help them make decision on what they want their WIKI to cover. Most of our staff is now comfortable with this application, so an online refresher tutorial would suffice to allow us to move with the action plan. Any teachers not familiar with AWARE can simply view the tutorial to get up to speed with the rest of the staff.

Professional Development directly related to the WIKI program

People resonsible

I will work with our technology teacher to create an example WIKI using this program.

Required resources

We will need a computer lab with enough a computer for each attending staff member for one hour. It will take approximately 30 minutes to create a WIKI to use as an example for the staff. It will take another thirty minutes to an hour to plan out the actual development time.

Presentation material

I will show the teachers how we use the example WIKI. This will include information on accessing the WIKI and making contributions to the content. Once the staff is comfortable with this, we will move on to creating WIKIS for their own classroom use. They will learn how to set the subject matter for the WIKI. During this time, we will cover how control who can view and contribute to the WIKI. The development will conclude with a discussion on prepping their students for acceptable use and cyber ethics concerns that may arise as the class uses the WIKI.

Time Line

The example WIKI will be completed by January 8th. The development will take place January 14th. Teachers will be asked to have their WIKIs up and running by January 29th

Part 3

Evaluation

Evaluating the success of this plan is very simple. Each teacher will submit a hyperlink with their name as the text to their department chair. The department chair will combine these hyperlinks into a grade level list. This list will then be forwarded to the school secretary to be collated into one document. Teachers will need to set their WIKIs to allow anybody to view them not necessarily to contribute to them. To see how the WIKIs are working, the principal will need to only open one document to access the WIKIs that each teacher is using.

NOTE:

Nancy Seidensticker and I both worked on using WIKIs. I got the idea to see what my district offered in terms of WIKIS from her entry on the discussion forum. Upon finding that the program is already in place in my district to make WIKIs a reality, I did not want to pass up the opportunity to plan such a low cost/large impact staff development.

Star Chart Data

Star Chart Data

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Educator Preparation and Development—the Intermediary Domain of Star Chart Data Week 2 Part 2

In many ways, the key area of Educator Preparation and Development is an indicator of how well technology dollars and resources have been used and will be used. Each campus’s score in this domain comes from teachers noting the amount and quality of instruction time they receive in preparation for adding new technology to their classroom routine. Any administrator will tell us that the week of conferences and staff development before students arrive for the year is simply packed with state required lectures such as the one covering sexual harassment.

During this time when teachers have the energy and inclination to incorporate new ideas into their plans, they are stuck in staff development not directly related to their instruction. The school year starts, and now it doesn’t really matter how much the administration supports technology or how well your infrastructure has been updated. We fail to make it to advanced or target ratings in Teaching and Learning because not enough time has been spent showing the teachers how to instinctively use technology for collaborative instruction. Thus, we see that a campus’s score in Teaching and Learning closely follows its score in Educator Preparation and Development.

We see this trend play out on both the local and state levels. On my campus, Teaching and Learning and Educator Preparation and Development scores have been one point away from each other improving in lockstep over the past three years. At the state level, the percentages of schools scoring for the two domains are never more than six percentage points away from each other. For example, the statewide percentage of schools that report scoring at developing tech in Teaching and Learning and Educator Preparation and Development are 69.7% and 74.2% respectively.

I believe this indicates that more quality time spent training staff will result in higher student achievement and higher percentages of schools reporting levels of advanced or target tech. Now, many of the non-negotiable seminars that teachers have to sit through during that week before students arrive are unavoidable. However, they are only mandated because the state mandates them, or the district mandates them. As administrators, if we want to see the best return on the tax payer’s dollar, i.e. students communicating and working collaboratively with the technology that costs so much money, than we need to ask for some adjustments to the current policies. Just imagine what we could do if we could move the boring housekeeping style seminars to the weekly staff meetings, and use that week for planning and learning how best meet the goals the state set forth in its Long Range Plan for Technology.

Identification of Spiraling TEKS Week 1 Part 4

The ability to use a wide variety of input devices is a skill required by the TEKS throughout grades PK to 12. In PK, this TEKS is labeled X.A.2. For the K-2 and 3-5 cluster, it is labeled as section b.2.A in its respective cluster. The label changes to subsection c.2.A for clusters 6-8 and 9-12.

Summary of PK technology aplication guidlines Week 1 Part 4

These guidelines set up the basic foundation student will need to excel in their future classrooms. They must understand how to follow the directions given to them by a computer program. They must know how to use a variety of input devices such as keyboards, a mouse, microphones, and touch screens.

Long Range Plan for Technology (LRPT) Week 1 Part 3

The scope of change required to meet the goals of the LRPT is daunting. In effect, the LRPT includes actions points and requirements for nearly every aspect of teaching and learning. The key here will be actively assessing your campus’s current status with regards to the LRPT. One will then be able to begin to gradually and systematically introduce new practices and technology to the school. It’s fair to assume that most districts need to increase their funding for more technology applications, and they need to fund more professional development time so the staff can make the best use the resources they have been given. Because of this, campus administrators must begin the financial needs of their campuses now in anticipation of the SBEC’s rigorous standards set forth in the LRPT.

What can my campus do about this right now? We have a two rolling wireless laptop stations that could be used to show students how to collaborate with each other. Classes could access a forum devoted the material being taught that week and enter their ideas and concerns to be shared with the other classes and teachers. I’ve chosen this particular idea as it is what we are already set up to do with regards to our technology budget and classroom resources.

Reflection on the State of Technology Use for Instruction-Week 1 Part 2

Our district has recently adopted three new programs. We’ve changed our grade book, curriculum, and data processing systems. As a result, we are seeing a decrease in effective use of data. This is because teachers must be familiar with how a program works in order to use it intuitively on a daily basis. Administrators in my district made the mistake of forgetting the realities of the classroom—teachers will not make time to learn a new technology once the school year has begun. At the end of the day, I simply have no energy to sit in front of my school computer and figure out the new data disaggregation software. The 45 minute after school training we received was ineffective as we didn’t put that training to practical use soon enough to make the training stick.

This situation has lead to a trend in technology use on my campus. Teachers are using what they knew and were familiar with last year instead of implementing new practices introduced this year. Students are passive receivers of instructional technology. Their experience is limited to at best, creating a PowerPoint in computer class, or completing basic math facts lessons on our math drill software. In fact, most of the time, our technology is used to bolster the effectiveness of lecture, i.e. Document cameras, LCD projectors.

I completely agree with the results of both of my assessments. They show that within the basic applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, I am proficient. The assessments also reflect the fact that I can use a variety of digital hardware to improve my presentation of information to my students. The major gap I see in my proficiency is twofold. First, I need to learn to use collaborative software designed to interact with other professionals. Second I need to enable my students to become active, rather than passive, beneficiaries of the classroom’s current technology allotment.