On October 30,, 1998, Dr. Craig Organ and I presented at the National School Board Association Conference and provided a handout on "Contextualizing Technology Training (1993-2001)". How did we provide technology training for teachers in the school context, teacher context, and classroom context in Chesterfield County Public Schools? Over five year period (1993-98) all educators in Chesterfield County Public Schools were required to have at least ten hours of technology training every year. We created a survey on hierarchy of skills - Experimenter, Challenger, and Innovator. The professional development was offered by technology consultants in elementary schools and technology coordinators (today we call them Instructional Technology Resource Teachers). The School Board funded technology trainers to be shared among the elementary schools. Each school offered sixty hours of technology training in small groups based on the needs of teachers in small groups (Professional development contextualized). The goals of the professional development was to empower the teachers to focus on instructional practices that result in developing collaboration, problem-solving, communication, and research skills in students. One of the slides in 1998 presentation state Students as Collaborative Problem-solvers, Critical Thinkers, Creative Researchers, Communicators, I even wrote a grant titled: C-Cubed: Critical Thinking, Collaborative Problem-solving, and Creative Research. I felt communication needs to be emphasized in all three areas and so I called the project, C-Cubed. The professional development's outcome was for teacher to create projects focusing on Three Cs in their content areas. Virginia Department of Education funding paid for teacher stipends for their summer learning and development including content-specific technology tools. See the image created by Tom Parks, the technology coordinator in Matoaca High as the cover page for the teacher manuals.
We still hear the same student outcomes of problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration today, don't we?
When we evaluated the success of the professional development model, we observed that teachers were presenting in conferences, implementing telecollaboration (telecomputing) activities, writing tasks at the computers, pen-pals projects, and multimedia projects. At the Central Virginia Educational Technology Conference (titled TechFest in those days), more than 40% of the presentations were done by Chesterfield County teachers. Teachers were using computers as tools for personal productivity. In order to help the teachers to move forward, we realized that teachers should be integrating technology resources in teaching and learning. So we created a plan for 1998-2001, "Learning, Creating, and Integrating (LCI)." In alignment with Virginia's Instructional Technology Standards for all Instructional Personnel, we created ten strands of technology competencies (1. Operating computers and other tools, 2. Wordprocessing, 3. Databases, 4. Spreadsheets, 5. Telecommunication, 6. Electronic research, 7. Multimedia, 8. Curriculum/Job specific tools, 9. Pedagogy & Researcg, and 10. Legal and ethical issues. Each teacher developed their LCI portfolio with two new learning, two creations, and three integration on different strands every year for three years. School leaders and teachers were involved in creating this professional development and the technology coordinators provided technology integration examples for various grades and content areas.
Looking at the rubric we created for each content and grade, I realize that change is constant in our lives. The rubric, terms, and phrases of technology integration have not changed over these twenty years, however the integration of mobile computing today has provided opportunities for students to be creators of knowledge.
What do we miss today from the days of the past? Very rarely we see international collaboration projects in schools today unless a teacher is personally passionate about it. That was not true from 1993 to 2001. There was not a whole lot of assessment pressures, Learning was fun through collaboration in classrooms without borders!
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