CONCEPTS OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
CONCEPTS OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
CONCEPTS OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
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Powerful call to action
Digital Learning in a Global context
References:
Clear, J. (2014). How long does it actually take to form a new habit? HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/forming-new-habits_b_5104807
Newcombe, T. (2015). What went wrong with L.A. Unified’s iPad program? Government Technology. https://www.govtech.com/education/what-went-wrong-with-la-unifieds-ipad-program.html
Nooruddin, S., & Bhamani, S. (2019). Engagement of school leadership in teachers’ continuous professional development: A case study. Journal of Education and Educational Development, 6(1), 95–110.
Pella, S. (2015). Pedagogical reasoning and action: Affordances of practice-based teacher professional development. Teacher Education Quarterly, 42(3), 81–101.
Stewart, C. (2014). Transforming professional development to professional learning. Journal of Adult Education, 43(1), 28–33.
Twining, P., Raffaghelli, J., Albion, P., & Knezek, D. (2013). Moving education into the digital age: The contribution of teachers' professional development. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(5), 426-437.
Wood, C. L., Goodnight, C. I., Bethune, K. S., Preston, A. I., & Cleaver, S. L. (2016). Role of professional development and multi-level coaching in promoting evidence-based practice in education. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 14(2), 159–170.
Sharing Research
Innovation Plan update
Trends in education have always changed at a rapid rate. Innovation is always progressing and moving us forward. But no one was prepared for the type of push we would receive in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced education to rethink and redesign many of its long-standing traditional practices.
Educators need to have a perspective of the global uses and challenges of information and communication technology. For us all to effectively pursue significant learning environments and the use of the COVA model, we need to understand what has historically worked and what has not worked in the world of education. Moving forward requires an application of the works of the past
As education at large has undergone an intense wave of change, it is more important than ever that our teachers feel prepared and supported. Many of us are still adjusting to new expectations and teaching methods.
Professional development must change as well. We cannot rely on traditional strategies to adequately support and promote growth among our teachers. This call to action will hopefully inspire a dramatic innovate change to the way teachers continue to learn and improve.
My innovation plan involves creating an effective professional development program that reflects more of the innovative models of learning, rather than the traditional, lecture-based PD sessions that most teachers are accustomed to. My envision professional learning experience will include teacher choice, ongoing support, and collaborative reflection that offers a personalized approach to PD to better serve our teachers. The initial plan can be reviewed here:
In support of this idea, I have written the following Literature Review that analyzes the common themes from both research and case studies on how districts and organizations, both locally and internationally, have approached professional development as it relates to blended learning. These themes have helped provide a clearer picture of designing and implementing an effective blended learning professional development experience.
As an Innovation and Learning Specialist on my campus, I do not have my own students in a classroom. Although I am in classrooms every day, I mostly support teachers through instructional coaching and lesson plan development with a focus on high-yield instructional strategies and technology integration. We strongly promote the TPACK model, which values content knowledge and solid pedagogy, using technology when it can enhance the learning environment.
Therefore, my original Innovation Plan centered around supporting teachers and their professional growth. I wanted to make professional development something that teachers got excited about and create a learning environment that was unlike anything they had experienced.
However, my initial idea ran into problems in March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown that came with it disrupted our ability to meet as teachers (and their Innovation and Learning Specialists) were now working overtime to try and help all K-12 students and parents make a full transition to remote learning.
While this situation may seem like the worst-case scenario, our predicament ended up creating more momentum for the promotion of innovative teaching methods, such as blending learning, across the entire district. This was a pivot I didn’t know that I needed. Last spring, we provided support for teachers as they utilized technology more than they ever had before to create online videos, digital activities, and alternative forms of assessment. We hosted virtual professional learning sessions that focused on the requested topics from teachers. When plans were finalized for our district to offer both face-to-face and virtual learning for the entire school year, our team helped build the online platform where teachers could design their digital classrooms.
Blended learning had now become the standard for content delivery. Teachers needed to post brief instructional videos to meet the needs of the virtual students and those who were face-to-face would often utilize those same videos in class, or even be assigned to watch those videos for homework. Because hybrid learning forced us all to move our instruction online, teachers have now taken advantage of this and have naturally incorporated blended learning on a much larger scale than I had initially envisioned.
All of these events have resulted in an adaptation to my Innovation Plan. I will specifically target the production of a blended learning model for our professional learning department that consists of online courses partnered with instructional coaches for ongoing support. After reviewing many sources on blended learning professional development, here is what I found:
What Worked
Districts and organizations found success in these initiatives by including several key features in their blended learning programs.
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Choice: teachers need to have the ability to select what they want to learn, how they want to learn it, and the pace at which they learn.
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Frequent feedback from PD facilitator: taking advantage of available technology and virtual environments, teachers can receive instant feedback at a high frequency. This form of formative assessment allows facilitators to guide the learning process like never before.
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Delivery of online content needs to be grounded in solid instructional design theory: simply moving PD from a traditional format to something new and innovative does not guarantee its efficiency. Online courses need to be relevant, purposeful, and include a healthy variety of delivery methods, including video, audio, documents, infographics, among others.
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Collaboration: teachers do not learn as constructively in isolation; value must be placed on face-to-face interactions among participants.
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Reflection: for teachers to improve upon their instructional practices, they need opportunities to assess their current reality, set goals, and analyze the progression of their learning.
What could be done better
Here are some of the challenges and roadblocks that others have experienced with this type of innovation.
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Use a familiar platform: Districts ran into trouble with their participants when professional development was suddenly moved online to a platform that had never before been used by teachers. It is better to transition with something familiar rather than something new, even if it has advanced features.
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Design engaging content: Teachers still want to be engaging, entertained, and feel like their learning matters. Equal amounts of effort are needed when designing blended learning experiences as with face-to-face. Uploading a few videos and requiring a discussion board post is proven to not have an effective outcome.
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Avoid isolation: Teachers struggled when PD reduced the amount of collaborative and social opportunities. There are ways to promote collaboration in a blended learning environment that will meet this need that adult learners have.
Applying Lessons Learned
After reviewing peer-reviewed literature and identifying the factors mentioned above. I will be shifting the focus of my innovation plan to more of a systematic infrastructure of professional development that utilizes learner choice, online and blended learning, and instructional coaching for ongoing support. Throughout this journey, I have worked closely with my director. I plan to propose this idea and hopefully our team will be able to implement this new innovation plan.
The Innovation and Learning department will build a database of online courses from which teachers can choose as a part of their professional learning journey. These courses will be followed by in-person collaborative implementation support by instructional coaches. We will host this system in our newly purchased PowerSchool software. This will make personalizing a teachers’ desired learning journey easier to customize, track, and incentivize. The overall vision is to encourage the use of blended learning in the classroom by giving teachers opportunities to learn through a blended learning environment themselves.
To encourage choice, voice, and ownership of learning, we will tailor each course for specific teacher needs, meaning we will build each course from scratch. Initial surveys will go out to every teacher in the district and we hope to get some solid data on the pulse of our teachers and what type of support they feel they need.
These online courses will be followed by instructional coaching. If several teachers from the same department or grade level opt to begin a track together, these group coaching cycles will allow for peer-to-peer collaboration and support. Instructional coaching will also ensure that teachers have adequate classroom support during the implementation phase of their professional growth. Furthermore, this process will be used to develop teacher leaders on campus. Once we have a group of credentialed teachers (who have completed a particular learning track), they could host their own learning opportunities, build their own online courses that dive even deeper into the topics of their interest.
The overall goal of this initiative is to:
Implement a professional development program that empowers teachers to become self-directed learning by offering choice, voice, ownership, and authentic learning opportunities, as well as provide the supportive resources they need in order to grow as professionals and improve the quality of learning in their classrooms.