I'm part of the team that is rolling out a new web based report card to all 5,000 elementary teachers at my school board. There are 8 of us who will be working in our school board's training labs and at schools in-servicing teaching staff. With the in-servicing and support calls, I know that it is going to be a very busy October and November. If you have any tips for large rollouts I would love to hear them.
I have just finished reading "Innovative Approaches to Literacy Education." It is a book that includes chapters from a number of different authors. While I didn't find very much new information I did enjoy reading Tim Lauer's chapter journey from web pages to blogs and RSS, and Dale Hubert's Flat Stanley project.
Julie Coiro's final chapter really stood out. She reflects on effective professional development for technology integration and outlines four things that she has learned through her own experiences.
1. Most effective when professional development is determined by teachers around their own needs of professional study.
2. Listen to teachers needs and provide resources that address those needs from a realistic classroom perspective.
3. Teachers are seeking research-based effective practices that support integrating technology into instruction.
4. Teachers learn best when provided with models for linking technology with purposeful reading and writing activities.
She points to the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow study which suggests that teachers move through a developmental continuum in their integration practices:
1) adoption – use technology to support traditional instruction
2) adaption - integrate technology into existing classroom activities
3) appropriation - developing new approaches to teaching by taking advantage of technology
4) innovation - discover new uses of technology tools
Julie also advocates for the study group model of professional development which she draws from Lyon and Pinnel's book "Systems of Change in Literacy Education: A guide for Professional Development", where facilitators guide teachers through a professional development program framed in ten components.
1. Assessing the context for teaching and learning
2. provide basics of a new approach with concrete examples of organization and routine
3. demonstrate with explicit examples
4. establish clear rationales for the approach
5. engage teachers in active learning and exploration of new techniques
6. invite teachers to try new techniques and share their analysis of process and results
7. establish procedures for pursing a plan of action
8. coach for shifts in teacher and student behavior
9. coach to support teacher reflection, and continual refinement
10. extend learning through small group conversations that connect theory with practice and build networks among educators.
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NoteMesh – For Class Note TakingEffective Professional Development for Technology Integration
, from another international school in the same region that I’m in. Posts and comments like this from the US. And this, and this, also from the US. How do I get my school to look like these? Today I read this post from Quentin D’Souza with many familiar points. And Susan Sedro recently wrote an entire post (based on one of my posts) about how to get started integrating these new tools. But how do I reach these other teachers? Is it even my responsibility? I
Effective Professional Development for Technology Integration
Effective Professional Development for Technology Integration
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That’s quite a rollout.
I work for a high school district in Illinois, 2 schools, 5400 kids, 420 teachers. We recently rolled out a new gradebook and the success, and it was a big success, was entirely dependent upon 2 pilot groups. We released the gradebook to 60 teachers for use, and they found every little thing that was wrong with it, which we fixed. With this group, we eliminated all the problems and fined tuned the product to our climate and culture-this group lasted the entire year. The second group of 20 teachers was brought on at semester time. The purpose? To test our training materials that we would use to train 350 teachers in 31 sessions in the summer. We made many modifications-the end result? We used second generation training materials with our 350 teachers. So, overall, we got everything working right and prepared our training materials so that everything was in order and logical, and the 31 sessions went flawless. Additionally, we used members of the pilot groups as trainers, which worked very well because now they were advocates for the program and we had teachers training teachers. If I would have gone live with the product as is with all teachers, with my first set of training materials, I would have been in deep trouble. David
Thanks for your response David. I guess I should have included a few more details of the rollout. Your roolout sounds very similar to what is happening with us.
It is the nature of the beast at my school board, we have approx. 8000 teachers in secondary and elementary and approx. 80,000 students. The Academic Information and Communication Technology department (where I work) is made up of 6 teacher-consultants and a coordinator for the entire school board.
Last year we had eight pilot schools, which included the biggest elementary school in our board. These schools did most of the trouble shooting and bug reporting for the application. The Web based report card is an in-house application so the product continues to evolve with new requests and improvements to the application.
The web based report card is quite static at this point and will remain the same throughout this first term rollout. Where we will be doing bugs and not application improvements.
We have improved the training materials from the last year’s pilot, so I guess we would be in version 2.0. There is a context sensitive Help menu that includes PDF training materials, as well as screencasts that guide you through all the buttons and things you can do any any particular screen. (I’m sure educators will quickly get tired of hearing my voice)
We do have members of the pilot group who will be doing training at their local schools and hopefully we will pull them in for a few days of support as well.
It would have been too hard for us as a department to maintain both versions of the report card – one web based and one that is software from the Ministry of Education – to support a staggared implementation model. So we have 160 schools coming on board this term.
We are using a staggared rollout for our web based markbook software that is going out to all secondary schools (approx. 8 schools a year for 4 years). This is being done concurrently to our elementary rollout and we are in the second year of this process.
Quentin: wow, you guys have done your homework-looks like it should go very well. I agree-it is very similar. Good luck with everything. David