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New Norfolk - Taking professional learning into the classroom
Background: The school has a proud history of professional
leadership in the use of ICT in teaching and learning, however efforts to
maintain the previous level of expertise and practice have become more difficult
with loss of leading practitioners and reduced resources.
Aim: To make better provision for ICT professional learning leading to
more consistent integration of ICT into actual teaching and learning in classes
Action Plan
The school project team devised an action plan with three steps
- Find our where staff are 'at'
- Select a meaningful starting point and provide appropriate training using
'buddies' where possible
- Plan and make provision for the participating staff to take their learning
into their classrooms
Survey of staff:
- Confidence with current software and devices
- Professional learning needs – using ICT in-class, problems with programs
- Hopes & needs for literacy purposes
- Peripherals – confidence and hopes
PD workshop: short (40 mins), focused, simple - narrowed down to one package to begin with:
Kidpix 3
Workshop strategy
- don’t overload people – focus on one package for whole PD session
- used confident teachers to present to show less confident teachers how they used/ managed the package in their class
Workshop aim:
- to increase confidence
- to increase collaboration by
- sharing knowledge to achieve standard format
- ongoing PD same process but different packages
- how would teachers like to use ICT support in-class?
Into the classroom
Taking the learning into the class program: provide in-class support in the form
of
- Modelling sound practice incorporating the use of Kidpix
- Co-teaching with the learner
- Providing operational and troubleshooting back-up in an introductory lesson.
- Follow up by negotiation.
Findings
1. About staff expertise
- The distribution of expertise patchy across the staff and for an
individual staff member
- ICT knowledge and skills are quite specific and initially abstract (especially
for beginners)
- Some staff members are an ‘expert’ in only one program a liberation to know that many previously seen as experts are only
'expert' in a limited number applications as teachers tend to focus on what they don’t know, their inadequacies
and are conscious of teachers who 'do know'
2. The following important principles have been identified for the
design of professional learning
- Have a narrow focus, achieving confidence one program at a time
- Lead by example
- Build community support for linking professional learning and professional
practices
3. The questions we ask imply expectations of knowledge and abilities
- Almost a negative approach… finding out what staff don’t know rather than what they do.
- We need to know both to begin building a community of practice
4. Address the needs in ‘natural’ teams where possible – in this case study both the PD team and the group of learners were a ‘natural’ teams with a mix of expertise, resources, times that work together
5. Confidence starts from being good at something, maybe even only one thing
6. Challenges
- Catering for P/T, casual staff
- Stretching the resources - resourced on FTE but have to provide per capita
- Moving on from a focus on applications: initially the survey seemed to focus on use of ICT applications when ideally the focus should be on using applications in a classroom for teaching and learning purposes – focus should be on using applications rather than the applications and devices per se.
- However as confirmed in the Fairview study the focus will only shift from applications and or devices (the technology) to their use in classrooms when teachers are comfortable/ feel competent to use the application or device
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