Foundational Skills

To move forward after deciding to change my mindset on technology integration, I have to look a little deeper at my foundational skills. Today, you have to keep learning. You can't learn a skill from last year, and keep repeating that same skill over and over. To make a lasting impact on the kids, I think you have to be sure that your lesson has a valid lesson within it that they can see relevance within.

I'm going to relate my "lesson" to PD sessions I have taught. Remember, I get 1 hour once a month at each school. In year one, I focused on sharing resources that could enhance the classroom. This did not leave much time for the actual exploration of the resources. I would rate those PD sessions as an Entry to Adoption level approach. And at best, we only touched on hitting the following characteristics of learning: Active, Collaborative, and Constructive.

In year two of PD sessions, I made my focus a little more narrow and detailed. We adopted Google Apps for Education as a platform we would invest in using. So this year I broke each session down to a detailed session on Google Mail, Google Drive, Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, & Slides) Calendar, and Contacts.  While I felt this made things more basic, I feel that we really reached into the levels of Adaptation and Infusion. The teachers had time to explore the single resource in depth, and start practicing how they could put it into use in the classroom. I asked for more collaboration by asking teachers to share how they have used the resource in different "outside of the box" ways in their classrooms. This lead to some great meaningful discussion and exploration by my teachers.

While we never set clear cut "Goals" for where to go with the resources, I gave the teachers some basic "challenges" to get their creative juices flowing to think of ways to use these Google Resources in their classrooms that were outside of the box.

I do believe with the focus that I took this year, I saw teachers grow and gain a confidence in their skills.

We have to remember, not all of us have the same foundational knowledge as the next person. Some have to start with the very basic square blocks before they are ready to add the additional shapes into their structure. But gaining that support system of your peers, will grow each persons confidence.