ITS in Need of Guidance

Dear Classroom 2.0 community. I started working as an Instructional Technology Specialist about 4 weeks ago already
and it has been very interesting. I work with three different schools
that are all on different levels and where teachers all have very different levels of technology knowledge. My role is to work only with teachers in helping them better integrate technology into the classroom. The challenging aspect of my job is not managing all schools, but getting them to work with me.

The most challenging part has been selling myself to the teachers at each school. I was describing my job to a friend yesterday
and I came to the conclusion that I am a sales woman, I am selling a
product (myself and ed tech) and teachers need to buy into it. Now how I
am going to get my first buyer and how am I going to reach that tipping
point? That is where I am in need of some advice. I have set up some
times to meet with teachers individually, because I believe that this
will be the only way to really get them interested and engaged. I can do many
presentations on many different tools, but they will only really
implement them, I think, by working together with me. Any thoughts on
how I can "sell" myself better? I have spent many hours and days
researching many tools and I am at the point where I am overwhelmed with
everything that I know, but I have no direction on how to implement
it.
What do Technology Integration Specialists spend most of their day doing?

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Permalink Reply by Katy Scott on March 4, 2010 at 9:41am

I've worked as an ed-tech specialist for the past 5 years, and you're right -- the most difficult part of the job is getting teachers to buy in. You really need to approach the job as if you're a tech integration teaching COACH, much like a math or literacy coach. I think researching tools and keeping up on the current state of the industry is a great idea. Your knowledge base and relevance is what will keep teachers coming back to you.

However, in my experience, that's not where I needed to start. In my first year working with teachers, I did a lot of trainings -- of showing them how great various tools were. But only a few bought in. When talking with teachers, I realized the problem --- most of them hadn't bought into the idea that technology was NECESSARY in education. They saw it as an add-on, an extra duty. So I spent time getting the buy-in.

Instead of training, I presented to the staff on the importance of technology literacy. I showed them videos like "Did You Know," and discussed David Warlick's ideas of the 21st Century Literacy. (You can find this info -- and more -- on my blog.) One thing that helped me is that I was working in elementary schools that served low-income kids. The teachers saw that the kids didn't have tech opportunities at home, so we would have to provided those opportunities for them. In the end, once teachers realized that tech integration was in the best interest of the students, they jumped in.

After these presentations and subsequent discussions, I briefly showed teachers some of the tools available to them and surveyed them to find out what they most wanted training on. I then set up weekly hour-long OPTIONAL after-school trainings, based on the survey results (teachers got PD hours for attending). Teachers who were the most curmudgeon-esque showed up and -- better yet -- kept coming. One of the best things about the trainings, they said, was that it gave them a community of teachers in the same boat, so they could vent and brainstorm together.

During these trainings, it became clear that one of the largest obstacles to tech integration was teachers' fears of, first, not having all the answers and, second, not being able to fix something if it broke in the middle of the lesson. So my next step was to try to prove to teachers that it was OK not to have all the answers, and to just say "I don't know, kid. Can you figure that out?" That, in fact, it was a better strategy for teaching students problem-solving and thinking skills (this was fairly easy at our school because our curriculum was very progressive and student-led, so teachers were used to letting students stumble their way to solutions). When the time comes, you might want to consider model teaching, so teachers can see that this strategy actually works with technology.

Lastly, to combat the fears of technical difficulties, we decided to create a student-led tech help desk. If you're interested in this, here's more info.

Sorry this post was so long. I hope it helps you in some way. You're job is so important. Good luck!

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Permalink Reply by Francine Safdeye on March 4, 2010 at 9:50am

Wow Katy, Thank you. I did not even think about first getting them to buy into educational technology. I am going to ask around if a workshop on the importance of technology literacy has been done because this might be a good idea to begin.
I also have been afraid to offer weekly workshops because I am afraid that nobody will show up...How long did you spend on talking about technology literacy? Do you suggest that this be a mandatory session? I would like to prepare some sort of proposal so that I can talk about this with the heads of each school, who supervise me. I will also talk with the IT directors in terms of finding out if something like this has been done... I think that this is a great place to begin and a great place to get the conversation amongst the teachers started. One person has posted a discussion thread on the wiki that I created, but he is the IT director from one of the schools.

THANKS!

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Permalink Reply by Katy Scott on March 4, 2010 at 10:37am

As I recall, I pretty much did two presentations regarding the importance of ed tech in our school. These presentations were during mandatory weekly staff meetings -- I asked the administrators for an hour or so at the start of the meetings.

The first presentation covered the basics -- the "Did You Know" video, as well as stats specific to our community (only 20% of low-income students like ours have access to the Internet at home, compared to 70% of their wealthier peers, etc.). In my presentation, I created a video with these school-specific stats, but a hand-out would probably work just as well. The presentation was followed by a discussion about the implications of the stats. What did teachers find most surprising? Least surprising? How does this influence their thoughts on how they teach? etc. I basically just left it at that.

If you do something like the above, at the next staff meeting, you could bring in an article on tech literacy by David Warlick or Will Richardson or someone similar. Have teachers read it, and then lead a discussion. The biggest thing here, I think, is not to sound judgemental (I have a hard time with this) -- to be understanding and patient, while simultaneuously trying to light a fire under teachers. After this discussion, you could briefly demonstrate a few tools that help teach the 21st century skills outlined in the article. (It depends on the tools available at your site, but perhaps show them VoiceThread, class wikis, student blogs, screencasts, sites like blabberize, etc.) Then ask teachers to complete a survey on the tools you just displayed -- which would they most like training on, etc?

After this, you could plan the trainings. I would be wary of making them mandatory, just because teachers are going to be resentful that "this is one more thing I have to do." It depends on your school climate and the teachers you work with, but I would suggest just trying it out as an optional training and see who attends. I found that the first week, only about 5 people came, but that number grew each week (eventually, even the school administrators came to a couple of sessions).

I hope this helps.