Episode 240

How do you create a district-wide vision for Digital Learning?

Welcome to "Ask the Tech Coach," a podcast for Instructional Coaches and Technology Integration Specialists. In this episode of “Ask the Tech Coach,” Jeff and Nick discuss how a school district can set a vision for digital learning in the classrooms and how you can start that conversation with your administrative team and instructional coaching department. If you would like to be a part of future podcasts and share your thoughts, please contact the podcast. We would love to have you join the show.

Question of the Week

Our favorite part of recording a live podcast each week is participating in the great conversations that happen on our live chat, on social media, and in our comments section. This week’s question is: Question Topic: How can we get the entire school district on the same page when it comes to defining what digital learning looks like in the classroom?

Weekly Topic

Developing a Shared Vision and Goals
- How do you create a shared vision?
  - Asking … “what’s the purpose?”
  - Where is the target?
  - What is the objective?
  - What do we want our staff to get out of the training … and why?
  - How can we provide the training and experiences to get staff able to meet the goals
- Who is included in this conversation?
  - Superintendent
  - Cabinet
  - District / Building Leaders
  - Teachers
  - Students
  - Parents / Community Members
- Ways to ask the important questions
  - Google Form
  - Conversations
  - Quick Survey’s
    - What has or is working well?
    - Have your goals/objectives been meet?
- Using the Summertime to ask questions of district leaders
  - Map out and Diagram a full year program
  - How do you build a catalogue to support the goals and objectives of the district and building leaders
Prioritizing Professional Learning in and out of your district
- Creating a Professional Development Yearly Overview
  - Send out a document to the staff so they are on the same page
    - Here are the goals that we are looking to progress
  - Create a catalogue of professional learning opportunities
    - Internal
      - Meeting Speakers
      - Consultants
    - External
      - Conferences
      - EdCamps
      - Thrive
      - Sage
      - Health Organizations / Hospitals often run sessions
  - Using a Newsletter to support professional Learning
    - Work with your building administrators to put professional development information in THEIR newsletters
Creating a digital learning evaluation method that is flexible yet effective
- Have a variety of evaluation methods … not just the mid-year and end of year evaluations
  - Keep evaluation more informal and collegial so that it’s not a “gotcha”
- Using a Staff Survey (Self-Assessment) to allow teachers to share what they know and what they would like to learn during the year
- Use some type of “artifact creation” when it comes to digital learning so that teachers can showcase what they are learning throughout the professional development process
  - At the end of the day, the teacher is going to have to show that they know how to use the tool or that they understand the concept.
  - Allow for feedback and professional conversations around the topic and concept that is backed up by Instructional Coaches
  - Create an online discussion board so that staff members can collaborate and learn from each other
Providing constant support for students, teachers, and community members
- Creating a Student led “genius bar” or Tech Team
- Invite the students to run their own professional learning sessions for teachers (Students teaching teachers)
  - How to use specific apps
  - How to create projects that students already love doing and share it with more teachers
  - Students teaching Board of Education members how to use Google Apps (sharing, formatting, etc)
Protecting student privacy and promoting digital safety
- Digital Citizenship: Create a unified and tiered curriculum that supports the knowledge of but, also includes resources to support parents so that they are understanding what students are learning in school.
- Create a Dashboard in a Google Site that has a spreadsheet of all of the district used tools so that parents know what programs are holding content about their students.
  - Include the privacy policy
  - Include the paid/free status
  - Include how to remove student information if parents are not interested in having student information available.
Working together with parents so students learn both in and out of the classroom
- Parent Nights
  - Short form
  - Single subject events
- Parent University
  - Build a curriculum of learning that follows a theme
Embracing and Celebrating the Impact Digital Learning has on students, teachers, and community.
- Share the “wins” of staff and students
- Success breeds success
  - If people see that it’s working for others, they might believe they can do it too
- Post in newsletters, and (maybe) social media examples of what is happening in the classroom and share it with others
- Get your staff to present their win’s to other staff members
- Ask “how does this information get back to the students and their successes?”
Next Episode
- Standards

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