The Hardest Thing About Being a Technology Coach For Me

I don't have a classroom. Students don't come to me for instruction. I co-teach with in-classroom teachers on subjects that they want to infuse with technology. Most of the time I have great leeway in helping those teachers decide what type of technology they want to use and what apps should be taught or offered for certain projects. I appreciate the fact that my co-teachers allow me to try new things with their students, but I miss having time with my students (especially the one on one bonding it allowed) and being able to do things on my own. I realize that the structure we are in now is best for the place we are now, at our school. My co-teachers feel they can call on me to guide and support them as they venture into using technology more regularly. This can only be a positive in terms of using more technology for instructional purposes across the board (and yes, I see more technology usage in the classroom as a positive because it leads to individualized instruction); but I miss being able to have my "own" agenda. Now don't take that wrong, I am not trying to deviate from curriculum or teach inappropriate or subversive technology. I miss opportunities to try out new things I've heard about to see if they are truly as good as people are talking about. I miss my "guinea pig" moments.

In the past, when I was part of the related arts rotation, students came to me once a week for instruction. It wasn't the ideal way for technology instruction but the consistency allowed me to do things that I just can't do as a technology coach anymore. I miss that. Now, every single time I try something new in the classroom with a teacher it has the potential for "realness" to be all up in the lesson. Playing around with an app as a teacher and teaching an app to 24 students is very different and can have remarkably different outcomes. Now before you shake your head and say "Psssh, she teaches apps." Yes, I do. I try to teach new apps to students all the time, not because I feel like every project should just be done one way, but as an elementary technology coach I see part of my job as filling their technology tool belt with different options for later on in life. That being said, we do a lot of app-smashing projects and as the year floats by students are given options on how they want to do a project. It doesn't matter what means the end results are made with because they are graded by a rubric. So don't judge us technology coaches so harshly for teaching apps or websites. Somebody has to do it!

This year I am trying to find a solution for missing out on that exploratory instructional time. Do I start an elementary tech club after school? Do I find some teachers that might be willing for me to take time to just try things occasionally? Do I use a teacher's aide to play with an app that I am considering and just watch to see what questions they might have? Do I just go for it and see what kind of realness happens?

Regardless of the answers to the above questions, I love the fact that part of my job is to always be looking for new things. It fills a basic part of who I am. I never get bored with my job because it is always evolving and changing. It can sometimes be overwhelming because I also can never just pull out an old lesson plan, but for now, that's just fine. The hardest part is less continuity with the students, both professionally and personally, that's now a void that I struggle with filling. Teaching faces occasionally verses teaching names and personalities weekly is a big adjustment for me.

What I learned at #ISTE2014- I am a little fish in a big pond.

I am a little fish in a big pond. I thought I was special. I thought I had the DL on how to make technology work in a school setting- to encourage, to support, to coach teachers out of their comfort zone, to show the benefits, to be honest about the limitations, and to change my K-12 world one teacher at a time. I'm not special. I attended ISTE with 14,000 educators in Atlanta all wanting to make a difference by using technology in the classroom. It was an overwhelming experience.

I am a little fish in a big pond. I saw vendors "courting and wooing" big name educators in hopes of getting endorsements for huge school districts. I sat in my room in the evening while vendors were offering special evenings for educators. I wasn't invited...It felt much like high school all over again. ;)

I am a little fish in a big pond. I realized (and knew this already), that we really aren't doing anything cutting edge at our school regarding technology.- we are adopters and I am thankful we are doing what we are doing. I was awed by Gwinnett County, Georgia's push for BYOT in elementary schools. I was blown away by the amount of Augmented Reality workshops and posters that were out there. Nothing I'm doing is cutting edge, even though it might feel that way to me because I have been a first implementor at my school.

I am a little fish in a big pond. I got a little down, maybe even mad, as I saw the technology support that these big public schools often have because of great funding. We just don't have the funding to do that type of thing at my school, even though we are the largest private school in Chattanooga. We are dependent on enrollment and supporters, and there are always other very important and needed things vying for money at my school.

So what did I walk away with after I got over my initial feelings of inadequacies and not feeling like I was as special as I thought I was or that I wanted to be?

A. I am a fan of a technology. I do not believe technology is the end to a means, I believe technology is a tool. I see the benefits as I teach- students collaborating, students engaged, students organized, teacher workloads decreased so that more one on one can take place in the classroom, immediate feedback to help teachers, parents, and students plan, teach, support, and learn. I find myself having to stand up for my love of technology in ways that amaze me, with my own co-workers and complete strangers. Teachers feel threatened by technology. I want them to feel less threatened and more supported.

B. I am a innovator. I want to be a part of things that are cutting edge. I want a makers space for students to be creative, via cardboard box models or 3d printers. I want to do things that causes students to have to answer questions that can't be googled. I want to be a part of teaching students critical thinking skills. I want to dig deeper and see what bits and pieces I've learned and heard about would best meet the needs of OUR students in the elementary school. How can we reach every student? What forms of teaching does THAT student respond best to? How can WE help that student feel like a confident learner?

C. I want to bloom where I am planted. I struggle with being content where I am, which kind of makes me a pain because I am always pushing for more. I want to be the best support as a technology coach that I can be to my fellow teachers. I want to be the best teacher of technology that I can be to my students. I want to take technology to the next level at the elementary school, but not in a fearful climate, in a way that the teachers feel supported and confident in this process.

D. I want to set goals for myself and my school curriculum. These include:

1. Thoroughly defining what my job description is and how it can best help my school (i.e.- writing down what a tech coach looks like at CCS elementary school) and share it with my co-workers so they can feel confident in what they can expect from this role.
2. Immerse lesson plans in digital citizenship so that my students realize technology can exacerbate a heart issue quickly. Talk about digital footprints and show grace and love to those that struggle with using technology inappropriately. Teach students to set self-discipline with the amount of time they spend with technology (and perhaps teach myself).
3. Get keyboarding back into the curriculum.
4. Ask for us to go BYOT in the elementary school sooner than planned with a push in 3-5th grades starting with simple classroom blogging opportunities.
5. Find software, apps, options that gives teachers immediate feedback and students a feeling of accomplishment because of intelligent adaptive programming that differentiates to meet the needs of the student constantly.
6. Be hands on- find "guinea pigs" that want to try something new in the classroom, to work with their strengths and build. 
7. Incorporate project-based learning opportunities, including cross-curriculum subject matter, in order to make student learning more authentic.
8. I want to be more flexible and openminded. To know I do not have the DL on all things technology in the classroom. I am truly a little fish in a big pond, but I want to be a rainbow fish. ;)

Freedom to Choose and Goals for the Future

As a technology coach I find it important to teach and explain different ways for my students to CREATE using their devices. This school year I have "taught"at varying levels: Keynote, Popplet, Padlet, Haiku Deck, Pages, Google Documents, Sock Puppets, Tellagami, StoryKit, Stop Motion, Toontastic, SCVNGR, Picstitch,  Moodle, Edmodo, QR Code usage, and Noodlebib to various grade levels and/or teachers. I teach apps and websites so that students and teachers have choices.

The more I teach in this role of a tech coach, the more I realize my job is two-fold. First, it is my desire for technology to be used in the classroom in a way that it becomes interwoven in the day without a lot of thought put into it. As we embarked on this BYOT 1:1 adventure in the middle school and now having 3 iPad carts in the elementary school, I feel like this has been a year of legwork. I feel like I have learned much on how to be a better help to the teachers and the students next year. I feel that I have helped many of the teachers with a toolbox of tools and ideas to implement in the future. I feel I have introduced many CREATION options to students for future projects. It is this last thought that leads me to this post...

I am a fan of giving students choice. When they can choose how they want to present information, they take more ownership in their presentations. So this year, I have explained to them what some apps do that others do not. For instance, StoryKit allows students to write a "book," while Haiku Deck allows students to make a presentation. The same topic could be presented with both apps but it is important that they know the strengths and weaknesses of their options and the audience they are trying to reach. 

As teachers, how do we allow freedom to choose and still grade fairly? RUBRICS for grading. If we give our students rubrics with required information needed for their presentations, it doesn't matter if they choose to create a clay panorama, a podcast, a Toontastic cartoon, a slideshow, or poster art. They can meet the requirements in the manner that most appeals to them. When students feel they have choices in creativity, they own their projects more. 

So this was a year of filling their toolboxes with different app possibilities. We did a little app-smashing (morphing two apps together to create presentations), we learned the pros and cons to different apps (sometimes the hard way), and as always we learned from each other. 

I am very excited to see what next school year will be like. I have goals in place:

1. MORE classroom management training for the teachers so they feel more comfortable with the devices in their classrooms and I feel more comfortable not being in control. ;)

2. MORE time teaching students research skills and how to curate information.

3. Bring keyboarding back to the 4th and 5th grade curriculum.

4. Teach and integrate digital citizenship skills and lessons for preK-5th grade.

5. Finding opportunities for classes to collaborate with others- next door or around the world.

6. Spend more time in each grade for more projects.

Addressing the "Closeness" of Information for Student Research

From 1945-1957, my father went to grades 1-12 in rural Alabama. He was born to parents with a high school education who had amazing work ethics, a desire to be the best they could be, loads of common sense but limited "book smarts." For my father, to gain knowledge beyond his parents, he had to go to school. The youngest child of 5, he was the only one that went on to college and then graduate school because he saw the benefit of "more information."

From 1975-1987, I went to K-12 grades in both Alabama and Tennessee. I was born the daughter of the above father with a masters degree in Education and a mother who didn't quite finish her undergraduate degree in education. It was instilled in me that anything other than a college degree was not an option. I went to school to learn, I received some "book knowledge" from my parents as well as at school. In 1978 my "information world" was expanded. A man knocked on our door to sell us a burgundy set (with gold leaf) of Worldbook Encyclopedias. My parents bought them and they were placed in a prominent spot in our den. I would often pull one out and flip through the pages (while laying on our shag carpet in my bell bottom jeans). All of a sudden, as an elementary student, I no longer had to go to school or watch a National Geographic special to learn something about the big world I lived in. "Information" had come to my home. Mom and dad no longer had to take me to Northgate library for research. I had a source always at my fingertips.

From 2000-2014, my daughter went to PreK-12 grades in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was born the daughter of a mother with an undergraduate degree in Accounting and a father with an undergraduate degree in Business Administration. Her mother went back to school when this daughter was in first grade to earn a licensure to teach Business Education and then almost immediately worked to earn a Master's degree in Instructional Technology. This girl saw constantly that education was deemed important to her family. In her lifetime, the worldwide web has exploded. She has no remembrance of a time when there was not a computer in her home. She only remembers cell phones being a part of everyday life. For her, information has always been readily available to be known. At age 18, she has an iphone 5c in her pocket at all times, her own iPad, and access to laptops at home whenever she needs them. She is a digital native. When she wants to learn something hands-on, she searches youTube for a video (for example: when she replaced her iPhone's cracked screen by herself, or when she taught herself to knit). When she has a research paper, she googles for sources. Information is always at the end of her fingertips ready to be had. She is a digital native but right on the cusp of knowing it's there but not really knowing how best to utilize it for her advantage.

I struggle with the fact that we, as educators, have not equipped her as well as we should have to prepare her to be a lifelong learner with the tools at her fingertips. Students 3 years younger than her will have a better understanding of the power of the Internet and how to navigate, but for Jessica, she is in a limbo group. As an instructional technologist, I will share with her some tools and tips to help her in college. I will set up an Evernote account for her even though she prefers and learns better by "writing" her notes. I will teach her the benefits of how to take photos of her notes and upload them to Evernote to help her become a more organized student. I will tell her about apps to help her make flashcards, graphic organizers to help her gather her thoughts before writing a paper, citation devices that will help take the angst of incorrect MLA citing away. She struggles with math, therefore she will have a Khan academy account to help her when she struggles. I will put tools in her toolbox that will aid her for her future. She will pick and choose which of these tools truly help her and she will use the ones that do.

We, as educators, have a responsibility to equip all our students for success. Technology often alleviates so much of the burdens and angst in the education process. We have to teach good digital citizenship skills. We have to show students how to look for good resources, where to look for good resources, and beyond that, how to cite them easily without issues. The ease of closeness to information has opened the door quickly to us, but we must respond in kind. We cannot drag our feet as educators. We must prepare our students to see this as a tool and not just an overwhelming struggle.

I love the following quote from a TED talk attributed to Diane Laufenberg in the book "Getting Smart" by Tom Vander Ark, "Our new closeness to information forces schools to think of themselves not simply as places to get information but as places where children will be challenged and guided in new ways to use information. As more skill-building and content-sharing activities are offered automatically, schools and teachers can increasingly focus on the important stuff: critical thinking (what does this mean?), coherence (where does this fit?), and application (what could I do with this knowledge?)”

Preparation Apps

I've spent the last month researching preparation apps...having a shared set of iPads sometimes limits which apps will work for an ongoing project. If students in a class use Tellagami (for instance), and don't quite finish their project and then I take the iPads to my next class to do a Tellagami project, the first project has to be deleted to do the next project...ongoing tasks are not an option for many preparation apps. So I have been researching which apps allow me to carry on, which apps give me a significant amount of time to share my content, which apps have a "sign in" for creations, which apps are free to do this and which cost money.

In my perfect world, I would like to give my students free reign to use the medium of their choice when doing presentations and just grade via a rubric. This concept allows for student creativity and sparks their natural interests. This is not always an option though. Below is a link to a spreadsheet of apps I have used regarding presentations and some helpful information regarding those apps. Have one you want to add? Go ahead!

List of Preparation Apps

My Educational New Year's Resolutions

Recently I found "The 4 C's of Technology Integration" when browsing twitter one day (not sure what I found it). To me it was such a precise way to explain the different ways we can integrate technology in the classroom; it succinctly explains what I find myself rambling about often.

A few weeks ago the technology department placed a sign with this message in the workrooms at school. The thought was it might help someone see another opportunity for technology integration in their classroom:

How are you using technology in the classroom today?

• Creation
• Consumption
• Curation
• Connection

In the midst of thinking about the new year and the things I wanted to accomplish, I decided I would also set some New Year's Resolutions for myself regarding these 4 awesome C words. So here are the challenges I am placing before myself regarding technology integration:
CREATION: I want my students to learn a variety of different ways to share what they have learned. This school year we've used Haiku Deck, Google documents, Tellagami, Word Collage, Toontastic, Popplet, and Morfo (among others). I've tried to give my students varied opportunities to learn different apps for creation purposes. This semester I hope to have the opportunity for students to use the Show Me app, to use some video creation (I need to research this idea more), and have the upper elementary grades learn how to use a PDF annotator.

CONSUMPTION: I feel like we've done this well this first semester. While we are not using any e-textbooks at this point, we use the Internet and various apps for our students to do research on a variety of topics. For some grades, this might mean researching websites I've already found for them, for other grades it means learning how to look for quality information using a web search. My goal for this next semester is to really teach these kids how to protect themselves from things they don't want to see when researching. I want to teach them how to find great resources by using good key words and knowing how to know if a site is legitimate or not. I want to research more child friendly web browser options as well.

CURATION: This is the area I hope for the most growth in myself as an educator. Content curation in my eyes is having students seek out a topic, they use their senses and current knowledge to sift through the information to keep the parts that seem most relevant and important to their learning. Curation allows the students to make their learning relevant to themselves. This semester, we sought to help our second graders study Native American tribes, we then broke the students into groups researching certain tribes and then each member of the group researched a certain topic (i.e.- food, clothing, shelter, etc.) This allowed students to learn how to sift through all the research about Native Americans and focus their results. I would love to do this in a way students could actually choose what direction they want to go as they start studying a subject area. I see this as a hard skill to teach and will continue to research more on this subject.

CONNECTION: In the elementary school this last semester students have sent emails to their teachers, shared documents on Google Drive with their teachers and fellow students, they have collaborated on a document at the same time, and the third graders actually FaceTimed with a missionary in Germany to learn more about geography. I find myself holding back in this area due to the fact that I deal with elementary students but I do want them to see how the use of technology can connect them to greater learning opportunities through collaboration.

The Angst of the Anonymity of Ask.fm

I sit at my computer struggling as a mom and an educator. My heart fears the social networking site known as Ask.fm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.fm). The Latvia-based website is set up for people to ask others questions about themselves. There is an option to sign in and your name shows up on your questions OR you can do it anonymously. Oddly, I see a large portion of 13-15 year olds answering questions asked and posting pictures of themselves that seem to take social media to the next level of inappropriate familiarity.

Perhaps these kids can not see that this site would be a sexual predators playground. How simple it is to stalk a kid by asking an anonymous question. The following article gives some great insight into the perils of this website: http://www.chicagonow.com/tween-us/2013/10/facts-about-ask-fm-parents/

Here is what I am seeing that I am not use to seeing regarding these kids I know...a very easy digression when asking and answering questions- bad language, inappropriate questions, etc. whether teens are asking anonymously or not. Definitely anonymous questions are more prone to be inappropriate and open for the world to see...the entire world...including the guy on the sexual predator list that lives 2.7 miles away from your child. For the most part I see kids signing in and asking questions of their friends but I also see the anonymous questions that have a sexual bent to them show up fairly often.

While it is fairly simple to delete an Ask.fm account, it is also VERY simple to reactivate the account as well. That becomes a huge temptation for the kid that thinks they are being treated unfairly by having to delete their account. This site feeds our inner need to want others to want to know more about us. It gives the shy kid a way to ask a question they would never be brave enough to ask. It gives the girl a way to flirt. It gives the boy a way to say both explicitly or innocently what he sees in a girl. Teens very innocently start talking as if only their friends are seeing these accounts but I have NO DOUBT unknowns are always lurking.

The ease of bullying, as shown in the article above, worries me as well. Kids that don't normally "join in" can do so anonymously. This website opens the door for easy judging without accountability of any sort. It appears that the owners of the website have no desire to enforce any accountability either. To me, this is the epitome of the scary side of the Internet for kids that appears to be perfectly innocent to them. Just one of the reasons we have to teach our students and our own children about digital citizenship issues. We need to strive to be aware of the latest websites our kids are using; this isn't always an easy task because they do not want us to know, but it is an important part of keeping our children safe. So many educators and parents choose to just "not be a part" but I think if we all choose that avenue we don't show kids appropriate usage nor do we serve as quiet accountability. Our kids need to know parents and educators are on these sites.