What Now?

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Technological skill is a moving target, especially in education. When I started this program I was exploring if one-to-one support in the classroom was viable- now that is laughable- life comes at you fast. So as not to be blown past by the ever-evolving face of EdTech, I have identified a set of future educational targets for myself that can be addressed one by one, but also in a progression.  In the short term, I am looking to obtain Google Teacher certification, following that I want to work with my colleagues to develop a coherent technology policy that extends past “no phones out during tests”. With an eye towards continuing my EdTech journey, I also plan to work on a more robust digital meeting place for my district’s social studies teachers to share finds and ideas. 

 

In my experience, every teacher has their own favorite thing to do with the Google Suite- some love classroom to distribute documents to absent students, some go for its ability to quickly administer surveys, personally, I could not live without it’s robust commentary abilities. Each time I work with another educator and hear how they employ the suite, I wonder how they came across that particular item and then I try it out myself. Instead of coming across tips and tricks for the various nooks and crannies of Google’s offerings, getting Google Teacher certified appears to be a clear and well curated exploration into all that Google can do for me and my students. I am a bit of a collector as well: history books, Criterion films, esoteric trivia, so grabbing myself a badge that I can put on my page at work and on here is not something to be taken lightly, nor is the ability to upgrade that badge to a set of higher tiers if the program really strikes me.

 

My school has a technology policy, but not really; the program deals with acceptable phone use and encouraging the students to use their Chromebooks, that is to say: the policy is vague. That degree of vagary means that it is up to individual teachers to make judgement calls on tech usage in their classes, however, across a student’s journey through our Social Studies program, the skills they need shift wildly from teacher to teacher and class to class. Over the next few years I would like to work with my curricular team (and perhaps student representatives) to establish department-wide technology policy that will create vertically integrated technology skills that will teach our students not only the content of our classes but help them develop deeper tech skills that can be applied across the educational spectrum. Not only will creating this policy aid in reducing time taken to teach ⅓ of a class a skill that the rest have previously covered, but it will also integrate with my next goal which seeks to create a clearing house/ catalogue for content, tools, and reservoirs of information.

 

As I noted in my Reflection Essay , I no longer cast a ludicrously large net in my searches for tools which I can use in class, settling instead for a more targeted approach to finding resources and while I still find my current approach to be valuable, I notice that I always appreciate when another teacher mentions some tool and I have that “aha!” moment where I realize that it can be used in my class, too. On the other side of that coin, I always enjoy being able to show something I just discovered to my coworkers; the problem with this is that it relies on conversations organically moving toward one of these ideas. To mitigate this issue and still allow for teachers to share without being face-to-face is a problem worth fixing. I do not expect this to be as quick as setting up a Facebook group and saying “go”, rather, I want to work with my peers across the district in various social studies roles and create a way to categorize and summarize the resources so that they can be quickly searched and accessed. Over time, this site should develop a deep, library-like selection of sites and tools that can be used for various topics or goals. This goal will also tie in with the technology aim I spoke of above, enabling us to set more nuanced standards and categorize our technological building blocks for our content area as a whole.

 

These are not goals that will evaporate with a few hours of dedicated work, and they were created to ensure that; these are goals that are multi-tiered to push me forward. Finishing level one of Google Teacher certification (creating largely online classes, digital citizenship, and copyright) means I can move on to level two(optimization and design), creating a department-wide technological skill ramp will be an evolving process, and the entire point of the district site to classify and share Social Studies tips, tricks, and resources is for it to be a living document that will be owned by all of the teachers that can be handed off to new teachers as older ones depart, essentially creating a digital institutional memory that can be referenced even as technology continues its inexorable march forward.