Developing a Tech Staff Development Curriculum



Statement of Purpose
            After conducting a needs assessment, I found that the staff wanted some professional development and explore the technology to determine how it can be implement it in to their classes. The overall concept of using a universal note taking system used by the district as a whole will help students and teachers to streamline learning, by making note taking and resources available at any time because of the internet and because of the available multiple platform access that students will have. This Web 2.0 tool can “utilized by skillful teachers, can promote student learning and facilitate the development of lifelong skills such as collaboration, creative thinking and knowledge construction” (Martin & Mims, 2009). This will give both students and staff a consistency that they crave (Martin et al., 2010). This technology would be ideal for students and staff in the high school setting. From the survey, the teachers would like to see three things happen: (1) one to learn about the features that this software has and what it is capable of; (2) how can this technology be used in the classroom; and (3) how can students use it in and out of the classroom. It was determined that some sort of workshop, during the school day, would be the best way to introduce and train teachers on how to use the technology. A team of teachers will be trained at a central location for the district. A few teachers, by either volunteering or selected by administration, will participate in a workshop to give them resources and to explore the technology, Microsoft OneNote, so that they may develop and understanding to take better to their respective schools and hold professional development during the school day. The staff development workshop will provide hands-on exploration of OneNote to streamline note taking in the whole school district.
Learner Outcomes
            Next, we want to determine after conducting some sort of workshop, the outcomes for staff learning the technology. In other words, how will we know that a teacher has grasp the software and is prepared to take it to the class room for implementation. What we determined as an appropriate level of mastery is that the learner will be able to create a notebook, add content to it, and then share it with others. It is believed that these three things will give the teacher a basic knowledge of the software before the each individual teacher will have to explore the software for themselves. We know that students will be able to learn the basics needed, there will have to be support for students outside of class to master the technology, but a first level of help will be the teacher.
Delivery Mechanisms
            A workshop schedule will be planned for time line of implementation. Each workshop will be planned using a variety of resources and tools to deliver the learning of the technology to the staff. As described before, there will be a serious of workshop and demonstration to help staff learn the software from each other, teaching is the best way to learn something. It will be determined by administration who will be the best at learning about the software first. Then, those staff members will take it back to their respective schools to pass on what they have learned to their fellow colleagues (Bold, 2011). Each workshop will be introduced to resources provided by the company, they are free to educators, staff will be introduced to the software, and then a demonstration where staff will be lead by a member of the workshop staff to develop notebooks, notes, and then being able to share that with someone else, students or faculty.

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