In the past two years, my roles and experiences have changed dramatically, which have majorly shaped my perception of being a technology specialist. I went from being a veteran “teacher-leader” when it came to technology in my old school, leading me to become the Technology Instruction Coordinator last year. Now after moving to a new state I am back to being a new teacher trying to learn the system and make it work for me. Based on my experience as a technology leader, and how I’ve perceived my other technology leaders, I think the most challenging aspect is finding ways to spend your time that will create the biggest positive impact on your building.
When I was the leader, I was given the task by admin to find a way for students to make the most out of study hall, and my idea was to have them practice math on Khan Academy two days a week. Although I had confidence this was a beneficial plan, and my admin supported me after I showed them data proving my own personal successes with the tool, in the end I’m not sure it made an overall positive impact on the school. I can think of a number of reasons that made it unsuccessful. In the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, we have learned that to be an effective change agent you need to “Direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path.” I focused a lot of time and energy on trying to do these things, but I know that I could have been more efficient with each. For example, I tried really hard to motivate the students in the study halls to see the value in practicing math with Khan Academy. But I was not their math teacher, and they were receiving mixed messages from the person responsible for their math learning about whether the site was useful or not. I had been rejected by teachers for years when I tried to support them with using the site with their students, showing them that it’s good extra practice beyond what they are doing in class. Nonetheless, teachers were still giving homework on paper and on various websites, and they told the students that they could ignore our expectations and just do their paper homework instead. I did spend time teaching the math department about our new system and why we were doing it, but probably not enough. If I would have invested more time training the math teachers on how to use Khan Academy, showing them my own personal success stories and how I used the site to motivate students, perhaps there would have been a more consistent message and the students wouldn’t have pushed back as much. If this program would have been successful in the beginning, I would have had more time to spend on helping other areas of the school, which would have made the most positive impact in the building.
Now that I’m back in the role of being a teacher and looking to my own technology leader for support, I see how each scenario can limit what you’re able to focus on as a leader. My current leader has to teach three different technology classes throughout the day, as well as finding time to support teachers. Due to this, she is mainly supporting the teachers that need it the most and seek her out. The school also just recently switched to 1:1, so there are many issues that I dealt with previously that are just now on the radar of my new school.
This leads me to my pilot experience I’ve begun implementing this week, which is to use the site GoGuardian to manage student devices while utilizing them in my classroom. I was used to using Hapara to “focus browsing” at my old school, limiting students to only the sites that I wanted them to use while in my classroom. When I didn’t have this tool for the first time, I immediately noticed how hard it was to keep all of my students on task when asking them to use their computers, as I’ve grown to accept that it’s pretty much inevitable I will have to warn a new student each day to stop playing games. My immediate impression of planning and implementation was how much more difficult it is to do something like this working in a big district. My school district consists of nearly 50 schools and serves around 40,000 students, so the technology department is spread out pretty thin to make sure everyone’s needs are being met. The decisions that they make have a major impact on the community and need to be well thought-out. I’ve reached out to several leaders on whether they knew anything about the district’s vision for this issue, and my email has been forwarded to several different people with nobody being able to give me a clear answer. Eventually I was told that we are leaning towards getting GoGuardian, but nothing has been finalized yet. I still am waiting for more information, but I reached out to GoGuardian myself and think I’ll be able to get the pilot off the ground. I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what I’d like my implementation to look like, but it is difficult when I have to wait to hear back from everyone on the chain of command. My co-workers have been asking for guidance on what we can do to prevent misuse of technology during class, so I’m excited to try out the site, collect data, and hopefully show the district that we are ready for a tool like this.
