I would like to continue developing and facilitating professional development sessions for teachers that allow them to find, use, and make sense of information to augment their instruction and increase student engagement with technology in their classroom. I find there is a fine line between giving teachers necessary skills to use technology (nuts and bolts) and applying the technology in the classroom. In each of the sessions that I offer, I try to model how to use the technology and then model applying it in the classroom. This is a lot to accomplish in a 1 hour session!
Next year our district-wide focus for professional development will be technology integration. Working with all teachers (at all levels) will enable us to get over the nuts and bolts of technology resources and begin to focus on effective integration within our classrooms. That's where the power of collaborating will truly come in- being able to take a lesson plan developed by one teacher and refine it for your own. Most technology is not content specific.
Many times I feel teachers get into the 'just tell me what to do' mindset and we lose sight of how we can really change student outcomes. Giving teachers the power to find and use resources to support the Common Core Standards, but giving teachers the choice of how to use those resources in their classroom is a game changer. Having an entire district begin to work on effective technology integration next year will probably be messy. We will need a lot of support, modeling, direct instruction, and more modeling, but we can do it!
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