During my time in this program, I have had the opportunity to be an observer, participant, or a leader in several areas at my school. These opportunities fall into one of "the categories which encompass 10 specific skill areas which outline the responsibilities and knowledge needed to be a viable educational technology leader" (www.cosn.org) Each of these opportunities has helped me grow as a professional, as well as provide me with new knowledge to use for the rest of my career. There are 3 areas of focus that I am going to highlight in this post.
According to the framework outlined by CoSN, under Instructional Focus and Professional Development, area 4D works to "promote the application of technology to address the diverse needs of students and maximize student learning" (OPL Framework, www.cosn.org) Our system has been using G Suite programs for the last two years. During that time, our principal has encouraged teachers at my school to work towards becoming paperless. Many have run with this and have been able to almost exclusively use Google Apps and Classroom for classroom assignments, tests, homework, etc. It has been an amazing tool for our school. My principal asked me to present with him on two occasions to discuss what we were trying to implement. In March of 2016, we presented at the SITE Conference in Savannah, Georgia, and last June we provided a session at the CORE Academy at Jacksonville State University (JSU). Below is the presentation from our presentation at JSU. The purpose of these professional development sessions was to show how student and teacher productivity can increase by using applications such as Google Classroom, Docs, Sheets, etc. It helps to eliminate excuses and provides students with opportunities to gain real-world learning tools to help with future endeavors. We plan to continue to examine this data each year to see how our teachers and students have progressed.
The Google Slides presentation below outlines our PD sessions that were presented at SITE and CORE.
Area 4A, which is to plan for and coordinate ongoing, purposeful professional development, has become increasingly important to me throughout this program. I am fortunate enough to have administrators who are very open to and allow me to provide professional development opportunities to my fellow faculty members. These have mostly death with Google training sessions, but they allow me to grow as a professional and to continue to learn in a way that is important to me. These sessions have sparked new ideas for future PD that I will implement during the upcoming school year.
The Google Slides presentation below is from one of my local professional development sessions that I provided for my teachers.
Part of this as well is basic management of the equipment in my library. I schedule 4 carts of Chromebooks that are checked out on a daily basis to teachers. I also purchase technology with state and local funds and have been allowed to help in the process of budgeting and purchasing these items. This is definitely something that will continue to help me grow in the future.
The Google Calendar below shows some of the scheduling that is done on a daily basis.
Consortium for School Networking (2015). CoSN’s framework of essential skills of the K-12 CTO. Retrieved from https://cosn.org/sites/default/files/pdf/Framework_111815_2015_Public.pdf