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Raising skills and comfort
Ideas for helping teachers learn to use technology
 
Ideas from Chicago and Detroit:

 


Bogan High School provides laptops to teachers who demonstrate a need.
Bogan High School's teachers submit lesson plans and attendance electronically.
Several Chicago high schools include technology in a teacher resource room to allow experimen-tation.
  Murray-Wright High School's tech coordinator teaches alongside classroom instructors. Mumford High School's technology coordinator depends on student help.

Resources from other areas:

Long Beach Unified School District Teacher Proficiency Standards
http://www.lbusd.k12.ca.us/curriculum/Curriculum Services/Technology/proficiency.htm

Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership http://www.portical.org/matrix5.html
Trade laptops for time!

 
Believing that greater access to technology for their own use would encourage her teachers to make greater use of technology in the classroom, Bogan High School's principal, Linda Pierzchalski, started a program to offer teachers laptops for classroom and home use. Teachers had to write a brief proposal describing how they would use the computers and agree to spend 7 hours of their time getting technology training or training others to use technology.
About 40 teachers participated. The hours the teachers "owed" in exchange made it possible for Bogan to offer both computer education courses after school for parents and an extensive array of before-school technology classes for their teacher colleagues. Pierzchalski points out that if you compute the value of the time the teachers are contributing in dollars, it far exceeds the purchase price of the laptops, and everyone comes out ahead.
Encourage computer use
Von Steuben Center's administrators believe that helping teachers see technology as a support for their own productivity increases teacher comfort levels and their willingness to experiment with instructional uses of computers. The administration provided classes for teachers on how to use spreadsheets for keeping track of their grades and attendance. As a consequence of seeing the value of technology in supporting their own productivity, teachers grew more interested in integrating technology into their teaching.
Provide a practice lab
Bogan High School's principal, Linda Pierzchalski, arranged for the setup of a teacher computer resource laboratory to offer teachers a chance to "play" with new technologies in an informal, unstructured setting.
She encourages teachers to attend conferences and take training courses in technology use, finding funds to support their professional development. When teachers need additional resources to support technology use, they can usually trust that if their rationale is sound, she will find a way to make it work.

Involve tech coordinators in instruction
A key role in making things run smoothly at Murray-Wright High School is played by Katie Fitzner, the coordinator of the Technology Center. In addition to staffing this main lab for several periods a day, Fitzner teaches alongside the classroom instructors who sign up for the center.
Fitzner's help contributed greatly to the success of the African American Scientists Quilt Project. At the beginning of each stage of the project, Fitzner provided whole-class instruction on the technology-related activities for that stage. For example, students learned how to connect to the Internet, how to use search engines to look for information about their scientists, how to use PowerPoint, and how to download images and add animation to their presentations. Science teacher Julie Oberly was free to concentrate on content.
Establish student roles
Mumford High School's technology coordinator, Claudia Burton, depends on students to help her maintain the cleanliness of the Tech Center and assist other students when they encounter problems.
The students who work as Burton's assistants are either members of the school's Technology Club or students who work in the Tech Center as "application specialists." The students who work with Burton not only gain technology skills, according to Principal Linda Spight, they also get the experience of "being troubleshooters and helping others." Burton's applications specialists must all go through extensive training in basic care of computers and in using many of the programs that classes use regularly.

Burton trains these specialists to "walk the room," checking to see if anyone needs help and making sure that students are on task and that computers are all in working order. She also trains them in using different search engines to help other students conduct research on the Internet and talks to them about what different search engines can do. Teachers say they can rely on these students for solving small, routine problems their students encounter and to provide students with assistance as they work on their individual projects.