When I first moved to ISP, IT coaches (officially called Digital Learning Facilitators) would hold Cybercafes. We ran three Cybercafes concurrently, and each Cybercafe had a theme, and a sequential, cumulative curriculum over several weeks. Examples of topics were iLife, Google Addons, iBooks Author, Research and Searching, Google Sites, Spring Cleaning your Digital Spaces, Creation Tools on iPad, etc. Sometimes we would have 3 participants, at other times 6 or more. We surveyed the staff before each set of new offerings to find out what they were interested in. Some people didn’t show up some weeks, others who were interested could not sign up due to conflicts with afterschool and other activities. I think that it worked well for having people develop their technological capacity, but didn’t necessarily transfer to the classroom, and we had no agreement on how to proceed.
With the change in the makeup of the IT Coaches team and administration, Cybercafes fell by the wayside. None of us were excited to start it again, and only a couple of teachers in elementary had commented on their absence to me. However, I felt a glaring hole, and kept resurrecting the topic of professional learning in team meetings. We kept talking about it, but none of us were inspired (yet).
Then members of our administration and some other volunteers did some work with Ewan McIntosh, and came away with the idea of the importance of prototyping for creating change in classrooms and schools. The administrators of the school invited teachers to prototype something new.
A couple of weeks later, the stars aligned and a half kneaded idea popped up in my head. I thought that we could explore what works for professional learning for technology integration at our school. My initial idea was that we could have professional learning offerings of different lengths to find out what worked best amongst our staff. I thought that we could sometimes have breakfast meetings (school provided) as well as sessions during the school day and after school. The three coaches agreed to meet to refine the idea.
As a result of our collaboration, we decided to prototype 10 minutes sessions before school and during the school day to see what times of the day has the most staff participation, by school level and overall. We decided that this is a worthwhile prototype because it will allow us opportunities to recruit teachers for longer learning sessions either 1:1 or in small groups. Liz came up with the name Tech Tastes, and had the foresight to consider that we needed to track teacher interest in exploring the topic further, or in integrating the tool in their classroom, and created a Google Spreadsheet for that purpose. We hope to learn more about the effectiveness of brief introductory sessions in the broader context of IT integration at ISP. Once we have data on different types of PL opportunities for analysis and iterative prototyping – we hope to define a “theory” of professional learning for IT integration at ISP.
Tech Tastes are short, ten minutes sessions that take place every Wednesday and Thursday. There are 8 time slots on Wednesday and 9 on Thursday, and the schedule stays the same each week, including 1-2 times before school and sessions during each of our various lunch times. One of us (three IT coaches) bakes each week to provide a sweet treat to each of our colleagues who participate.
Our prototype is for 6 weeks. We are each tracking our own observations, and will formally debrief with each other during week 4, when we will all be away for the Learning 2 Conference in Milan.
I’d love to hear your feedback, especially any ideas that you may have for refinement.