Evaluating Classroom Technology Integration

2010-01-07T16:18:00.000-08:00

There are, of course, many thoughts and ideas on how best to evaluate our teachers' proficiency with classroom technology integration. There is no shortage of evaluation tools and rubrics. During the past couple of weeks, I've been designing yet another one because of my belief that successful technology integration is about so much more than what occurs during an observed 50 minute class. At about mid-way through, however, my attention shifted from "how do we measure" to "how can we help?" There are at least 4 big buckets.

1. Personal Productivity - How can we help our teachers get organized? We can help set up folders and files to organize data and resources for quick accessibility. Are they aware of online, social bookmarking tools such as Delicious, Diigo or Zotero? How well does the teacher communicate? We can help with communication by reminding our teachers to check email often and to respond to students, parents and colleagues in a timely manner. Does the teacher participate in a self-developed personal learning network in order to explore creative ways to use technology to improve student learning? Let's help them find Nings, blogs, listserves, RSS feeds, and Tweeters that may be helpful to them.

2. Instructional Practices - With the learning goal clearly in mind, how can we help our teachers continue to move from Teacher Centered Activities toward Student Centered Activities? How can we better equip them to not rely solely on such things as presentation software, embedded video clips, and Internet resources and to employ dynamic methodologies to truly engage students such as student exploration, innovation, collaboration and research (with real world issues and applications,) writing and publishing, creation, problem solving, and project based learning? How can we gently suggest bumping up the Bloom levels?

3. Teacher - Student Interaction... Does the teacher post resources to her teacher portal, calendar, wiki, or Blackboard / Moodle site? Can we help them do this easily and confidently? What classroom management strategies can we suggest to help our teachers keep their students engaged and on task? Can we help with ongoing formative and summative, aligned assessments and rubrics? How can we encourage technology-enriched learning environments that encourages the involvement of students in setting their own learning goals, management and assessment?

4. Ongoing Plan / Follow-up Dialogue... What steps is the teacher taking to continually improve his technology integration skills? Is it a part of his professional development plan? What resources and opportunities can we provide for them? Is digital citizenship continually communicated and do we have a strong education component in place? Can we equip our teachers to give their students the opportunity to locate, analyze, evaluate and use age appropriate information to enhance learning? Can we be helpful in helping the teacher plan to use technology to differentiate instruction for various types of learners and ability levels? Have we helped our teachers know which technology tools might be appropriate given the learning goal, classroom environment, and student make-up? How can we help the teacher use the technology expertly and seamlessly?

I started out designing a rubric to be used as a tool for classroom technology integration. I ended up doing a self-evaluation.

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7 Ways to Move Your Technology Program Forward When Everything Else is Frozen!

2009-11-15T14:10:00.000-08:00

Some of our budgets have been cut back or frozen. Some of our planned capital expenditures have been postponed. Some of us have lost staff or anticipated staff expansions have been put on hold. We're living through some pretty trying times but it doesn't mean that we can't use this time to move forward! Here are 7 things you might want to consider.

1. Use the time to step up staff development.

Since we aren't spending our time buying and installing, we've focused on staff development. It is a great time to work with teachers on their technology skills and curriculum integration. We had already established minimum technology competencies, now we are offering expanded technology training to help our faculty achieve them.

2. Consider sharing budgets with other departments.

Technology is a tool to help other departments achieve their goals. Incurred costs are inevitable. Why not consider sharing budgets with other departments in order to foot the bill? For example, our marketing department wanted additional space on a server to hold multimedia for the website. Since we did not have the money in our budget, they were willing to share the cost for this upgrade.

3. Negotiate and Re-negotiate with your valued vendors.

We all spend a great deal of time developing vendor relationships. We work hard to keep the relationships mutually beneficial. The fact is, we want to keep our vendors and our vendors want to keep us. Some honest talk and negotiation can result in some significant cost savings.

4. Shop better.

This is pretty simple. Be willing to wait for deals. Look for the "2 for 1" sales. Sometimes replacement parts can be found at eBay or other discount sites. Explore pilot programs. Patience is a virtue!

5. Look for ways that your technology program can actually be used to cut costs.

Have power saving and life extending strategy discussions with your providers. Our faculty has embraced Moodle as a way to communicate and save costly printing costs. Turn off the color printers (or at least monitor them.) Encourage and train your faculty to utilize Personal Learning Networks, webinars, and Skype in order to cut down on meeting travel and conference costs. Enabling cost saving measures keeps you in good stead with your finance department.

6. Find ways to use what you have better.

Faculty laptops are generally taken out of commission after four years. We re-imaged them with a lighter load, added new batteries and turned 24 of them into an additional laptop cart for student use. (Linux as an operating system is worth considering)

7. Plan better for future purchases.

We've had a laptop/tablet program for 10 years in our upper school. We are in the process of expanding our 1:1 program to our middle school. We will lower costs significantly by going with Netbooks. We are also planning to reduce the number of textbooks purchased by using online resources.

Teaching and Technology Integration

Evaluating Classroom Technology Integration

7 Ways to Move Your Technology Program Forward When Everything Else is Frozen!