Education Week - Calendar of Events - August 21, 2013 - C7

Want Better
Classroom Tech?
Give Teachers More Time
By Bud Hunt
As an instructional technology coordinator for a
large school district in northern Colorado, I see an
awful lot of interesting uses of technology in the
classroom. However, as a professional developer and
former classroom teacher, I see too many things done
to teachers and students, rather than with them.
If we believe that student choice and passion and
curiosity are essential to learning, how can we approach
professional development for teachers without
considering these as starting places for teachers
and their learning about technology? Top 10 lists,
sit-and-gets, and vague mandates about “technology
proficiency” are not useful. And yet they fill up Twitter
streams, Facebook walls, and blog pages all over
the place.
Four years ago, some of my colleagues and I attempted
a radical (at least for us) shift in the way
we approached technology-related professional development.
Our starting point was that teachers, as
learners and as inquirers, should have control over
their learning and explorations in technology. Thus,
the St. Vrain Valley school district’s Digital Learning
Collaborative was born.
A two-year program that costs about as much for
a team of teachers as one day with most technology
consultants, the collaborative is an attempt to return
the agency around teacher learning to the teacher.
In the first year, we help team leaders to convene
iStockphoto.com/Akindo; Vanessa Solis/Education Week
Cultivating Tech-Savvy Teachers
Should Be Higher Priority, Report Says
By Sean Cavanagh
Teachers may be the undisputed authorities on academic
content in their classrooms, but when it comes to their
knowledge of technology, many of them have a lot of catching
up to do.
The widely acknowledged need to improve the technology
skills of teachers and other school officials, and help them
understand how digital tools should be used in the classroom,
should be a major area of focus among state officials
and other policymakers, according to a recent report by the
National Association of State Boards of Education.
The association’s recommendations cover a lot of
ground—from the need to improve educational infrastructure
in schools, and tailor learning to personalize instruction,
to the need to use technology to build students’ foundational
research and analytical skills.
But the report also examines the extent to which many
teachers, principals, curriculum specialists, and support
staff lack the necessary familiarity with technology to make
the most of it in classrooms. Lots of barriers exist to closing
this gap, including steady teacher turnover, and a generation
gap: The average age of principals is around 50, the report’s
authors say, so “it will be some years before a large
portion of school leaders are digital natives.”
Many teachers, meanwhile, aren’t given adequate training
for the tech challenges ahead, the report contends.
“Many educator preparation programs do not provide ad-
equate focus on the teaching skills, dispositions, and strategies
needed to thrive in a technology-rich school or reflect
the digital learning environments we want to create in our
K-12 classrooms,” it says. “Professional learning for teachers
too often has not kept pace with advances in technology
or new ways of learning, even as the number and quality of
these opportunities have fallen significantly due to budget
cuts.”
One of the report’s findings relates to teachers’ understanding
of how to use data: Just three states have put in
place policies and practices, including professional development
and credentialing, to ensure that educators know how
to “access, analyze, and use data appropriately.”
The report, written by a study group made up almost
entirely of state board officials and others, offers several
recommendations for improving the picture on this
front.
Among them: State boards and teacher-licensing enti-
ties should take steps to ensure that teacher-candidates
have technology skills and the ability to use technology
to personalize instruction; they should ensure that aspiring
teachers have “robust clinical experiences” for which
they use technology and online programs; and they should
improve both access to professional development and
mentoring throughout the school day on technology.
This article originally appeared in Education Week’s Digital
Education blog.
teams of teachers curious about exploring more of
the technology around them. In that first year, we
instruct our teachers not to race to implement new
technology in the classroom; instead, we encourage
them to take time to play and explore and wonder.
Dig deep. Try something new. Fiddle with it for a
while. Explore. Play. Experiment.
In year two, we ask teachers to explore the consequences
of their explorations and learning in their
classrooms, and to conduct a teacher-research study
about what happens when they apply their learning
to students’ experiences.
This can be messy work, and some of the teachers
we work with are unsettled by it. They would much
prefer that we tell them what to do, and when to do
it, and why it matters. School districts, it seems, have
sometimes taken the agency away from the folks we
trust to facilitate that agency in others. That’s not
such a good thing.
But we have learned that prescriptive learning
isn’t learning that lasts, so we try to build support
structures where our teachers can struggle together
to better understand the technology that surrounds
us. We want those teachers, and the students they
support, to actively engage the tech of today, and to
be ready to face the technology of tomorrow.
You can keep your Top 10 lists, or your quick
tweets of “must reads.” And while tech-advocacy days
are fine and certainly can raise awareness, they’re not
terribly useful in terms of actual day-to-day organizational
change. So a special day to boost digital technology
use is a good start. But that’s all it is.
I’ve found that thoughtful inquiry and meaningful
time for exploration are the best tools for thoughtful
technology integration. Deep learning and instructional
change take time, and I hope you’re helping the
folks you work with to find the time in their days for
learning to happen.
Bud Hunt is an instructional technology coordinator for
the St. Vrain Valley school district in Colorado. He blogs at
Bud the Teacher at www.budtheteacher.com. This
essay originally appeared on the Education Week Teacher
website.
EDUCATION WEEK 2013 CALENDAR OF EVENTS & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTORY www.edweek.org/go/calendar 7
DIGITAL PD TAKES OFF
OPINION

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Education Week - Calendar of Events - August 21, 2013

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