Our teacher only day this week was a great opportunity to update staff on all the planning going on behind the scene for progressing BYOD program. We are making it an expectation that all year 9 students next year have a device that meets our device specifications. I think the staff were pleased at the work that has taken place, particularly with staff discounts available at Noel Leeming!
The day kicked off with a couple of staff members sharing their byod experiences. For this I chose one staff member who was confident to share to help kick it off and then two other staff members who were what I would call non tech savy teachers who have recently started developing their skills and confidence in using technology to enhance their teaching. This was really important for staff to see that you don't have to have a BYOD class to start your journey and that you don't have to be tech savy to develop skills in using technology in your teaching.
We then heard an awesome presentation from Claire Amos who talked about her journey with technology in education, her time at Epsom Girls leading E Learning using the Teaching as Inquiry cycle, how to support each other in our journey, ensuring that technology is being used in a purposeful way and why to bother going down the e learning pathway in the first place. In a skillful and mindful way Claire put many staff at ease with the idea that you shouldn't try it all at once as all that will happen is you will feel overwhelmed but that we should all take a very measured approach to what we use technolgy for. She was able to put many's fears at ease a little, while still managing to firmly say that this is happening whether we like it or not and that we have to ensure that we are preparing students for their future not ours. In particular I like the suggestions that we need to look further at the key competencies and values in the NZ curriculum and ensure that we covering these in the same way that we do content needed for assessment purposes.
Teachers spent the next session in departments brainstorming how things could progress in their subjects with technology using the newly identified key terms from their vision to help direct their ideas to purpose and pedagogy.
While this was occuring I met with our HOD's and SLT to go over a few details for the afternoons planning session. So far in our e learning journey as a school, it has been fairly open in what teachers could do with technology, how much they used it, how they used it etc. It was important that for the next stage of the journey departments started to have a more measured and planned approach to their use of technology in their subject area. We also discussed the types of excuses that may come up for not doing BYOD and how in their role it was important to move discussions forward rather than dwelling on the negatives.
The afternoon gave departments time. The one thing teachers are always in short supply of! This time was spent working on their department goal and narrowing down their ideas for cementing the use of technology into their planning and therefor teaching. Departments recorded their work in google docs that I had set up in advance. They have access to view all departments goals and brainstorm work to aid and support this process. Overall, I am really happy with what departments are looking at doing in 2015.
Click here to view our PD webpage to see what departments are up to.