Tag: teachers

Teachers Make the Big Difference

On By paulmcguire2013In #IMMOOC, #SAVMP, Hope, Not a Book Study, OSSEMOOCLeave a comment

The best teachers I worked with at all levels were always very concerned about the curriculum and what the students were learning. These were not teachers who ever got any attention for the great work they were doing, but these are the ones who ocontinue to make the big difference. I would like to find a way to feature what they do – they are generally too busy to do that themselves. These people deserve a voice, although this is probably the last thing on their minds.

I am sure there could be a good series of posts on this topic. As a principal, I wanted teachers to be engaging and innovative, but I also wanted to make sure they were teaching the curriculum. Last year, we did a workshop on makerspaces and we made sure that we could align the new work we were doing to curriculum standards – we knew that no one would pay any attention to this work unless we could link it to the curriculum. I believe we deserved to be ignored unless we could show that we were credible by following established curriculum guidelines.

The ‘star teacher’ syndrome makes me very nervous even though I no longer have responsibility for a school. We need to focus instead on good teachers doing great work teaching the curriculum to their students. I know of so many good teachers out there that do this every day, but no one other than their students and parents will ever know this.

Many of these teachers have no time to post. Who speaks for this teacher and the wonderful ones I worked with at my last school? As I mentioned in an earlier post – where is the teacher voice?

Teachers should be connected – I agree with what George Couros has written on this subject. Maybe some of us can begin to focus on these silent heroes and bring their great work into the light.

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Implementing Digital resources at your school some points to consider.

On By paulmcguire2013In 1:1, Digital Transformation, InnovationLeave a comment

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Today I learned that we will be losing two really important digital programs at our school.  This is a real blow for us as we are trying very hard to supply our teachers and students with excellent digital content to support the use of chromebooks in the classroom – all students from grades 3 to 6 have their own computer and the juniors (4-6) are expected to bring their machines home every night.

There are two important factors that seem to be influencing decisions about access to digital resources.  One is the expense, the other is implementation – not enough teachers across the school board are using these costly programs.  I would like to focus on implementation.

Implementation of digital content seems to be widely misunderstood.  You can’t just drop in a sophisticated digital program without a really good implementation program.  Like with everything in education, it comes down to the person.  If teachers are ill-equipped to use new programs, they will fall back on traditional teaching methods.

So what can we do?  Here are a few ideas.

  • Implementation is a long game – to successfully introduce a program, you need a full-year plan of PD and support for your teachers.  Some of this training has to be driven by the principal or someone else who is available to put on demonstrations and workshops during the day.
  • Webinars are good, but people are better.  We have found that while webinars are easier to arrange, teachers prefer to meet with a representative of the company producing the content.  When we have been able to arrange this, implementation has gone up dramatically.
  • Teachers need in-school time to experiment with the programs.  Last year, after the introductory workshops, all teachers were given release time to experiment with the programs.  They could choose what program they wanted to experiment with and many times they were able to contact the service provider to get just-in-time solutions to their problems.
  • Provide your staff with a good on-line PD resource.  We are in the second year of a partnership with Atomic Learning.  I consider this a great investment.  You cannot ask your teachers to rely on YouTube or Google when they have questions on a variety of digital programs.  They need a source for curated material delivered by professionals who are used to working with teachers.  Atomic is not the only source for this professional learning, but for us, its works really well.
  • People need to understand the importance of curated resources. Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers states that he rarely uses Google as a way to locate material for teachers.  This is a really important point.  If you want really good content, it has to be curated.  Discovery Education, for example, does an excellent job of bringing educational resources together in math, science and social studies.  Other tools like unroll.me and Scoop.it are wonderful ways to collect information of interest to you. You choose the content and receive (in the case of Scoop.it) suggestions from your personal learning community.  The important point is – curated resources can cost money.  You can’t sustain your school just using Google and YouTube.  You need to make sure the materials you are using with your students are excellent and have been selected by professionals – you can’t guarantee this with uncurated sites like Google.

Implementation is not easy.  It is much harder than simply buying machines for everyone in your school.  It is something that requires a great deal of thought and yes, sometimes, financial resources.