Effective Professional Development and Assessment Using Digital Content and Web-Based Tools

Technology, Learning and Change: A Webinar Series

This webinar series, based on the new book Technology for Learning: A Guidebook for Change, provides information about the process of creating effective, robust technology initiatives based on real-life practitioners’ successes. The three webinars will focus on the issues that help educators to transform today’s schools into thriving digital learning environments. The goal is to help you to identify and plan for key success factors and strategies that will help you get started, expand your existing program, or take your program to the next level.

2nd in three-part series
Tuesday September 27, 2011 | 1 pm PST / 4 pm EST

Click here to register for this free webinar

Using digital media and web-based content has tremendous potential to transform teaching and learning. It offers students engaging learning opportunities that provide the right level of challenge. In order to get do this effectively, teachers need ongoing, collaborative, and integrated professional development that builds their capacity to transform classrooms, raise student achievement and create high performing schools. As part of the process, educators must assess student performance carefully and adjust instruction to meet learning needs. When all elements are in place, the result is a transformation in teaching and learning. This webinar will focus on using digital content and web-based tools, providing effective professional development, and assessing the impact of change. Leaders from districts that have shown success will discuss how they got to this point and where they intend to take their strategy in the future. 

Presenters 
Marianthe Williams, Director of Technology, River Dell Regional School District, NJ
Leslie Wilson, CEO, One-to-One Institute 

Learning to Change--Changing to Learn

The Dynamics of Change and Fear

Carly Fiorina, former HP CEO, was the featured speaker for Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture May 2, 2008. This is a short snippet from her lecture that I found appropriate to remember when I am working with early and late majority technology adopters.

1) We are all afraid of something. What distinguishes those who are successful and those who are not is what they do with their fear. Courage is not the absence of fear; courage is acting in spite of fear.

2) Change involves risk-taking. What people are most often afraid of is something new. As people grow older, they become afraid of trying something new; therefore, change is always resisted. The only way to help people overcome their fear is to give them a vision of something that is worth striving for, worth taking the risks for.

3)It is momentum for any organization (family or institution or government) to seek to maintain the status quo. People become invested in maintaining their current position. This is simply human nature.

4) Change has to have enough power (vision) to overcome fear and status quo.

Web 2.0 and Change in Higher Education

I found a new online journal yesterday--The Knowledge Tree--tagged as Australia's premier e-journal of learning innovations.

Edition 15 is dedicated to the infiltration of Web 2.0 tools into teaching. Since the concept of Web 2.0 is only a few years old, the practices discussed are definitely from innovators and early adopters. In the lead article, How Did a Couple of Veteran Classroom Teachers End up in a Space Like This? Extraordinary Intersections Between Learning, Social Software and Teaching, Ganley and Sawhill (2007) explore how the integration of blogging into their teaching transformed their practice. The truth of one statement caught my eye.

"There is ... a new form of tension in today’s classroom: between the students we once were and the students we now find ourselves teaching, a tension between what we have to teach and what our students want to learn, and a tension between their passions and interests and the Academy’s curricular obligations."

I am reminded of the digital divide between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Today's students fundamentally process information differently from their predecessors. My mother retired from teaching high school in 1998 noting the change in students even then. Ten years later, the NET GEN has reached our college and university campuses enmasse. However, higher education, in general, is still stuck in the Industrial Age. Of course, there will be tension.

"[M]any teachers who do not have difficulty releasing old ideas, embracing new ways of thinking, may still be as resolutely attached to old ways of practicing teaching as their more conservative colleagues. That’s a crucial issue. Even those of us who are experimenting with progressive pedagogical practices are afraid to change" (Hooks 1994, qtd in Ganley and Sawhill).

Hall and Hord (2007) reiterated that change occurs gradually as individuals "come to understand and become skilled and competent in the use of the new ways (p.4). They indicated that most changes in education take 3-5 years to implement at the high level, and for each new adopting unit such as a school, district, or state, the countdown begins all over again for another 3-5 years. Mort (1964) chronicled educational innovations from the 30s, 40s, and 50s and concluded that the time lag between perception of a need for change to the introduction and diffusion of an innovation to meet that need was 50 years. Rogers (2003) also found that a "considerable time lag was required for the adoption of educational innovations" (p. 61), usually 25 years. So, how is technology affecting this process?

Hall, G.E., & Hord, S.M. (2007). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes. (2^nd ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Mort, P. R. (1964). Studies in educational innovation from the institute of administrative research: An overview. In M. B. Miles (Ed.), Innovation in education (pp. 317-328). New York: Columbia University Teachers College Press.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5^th ed.). New York: The Free Press.

Hearding Cats

I found this ad on YouTube. Sometimes working with people to to get them to accept a new idea is like herding cats.