Thinking about coaching

 Some rights reserved by jenhegna1

I've been thinking a lot about coaching (what it means to be an Edtech coach, a learning coach, a sports coach, are they different?) this week.  Mostly in relating to professional development for teachers.  I think a lot of us know where we want to be, or what we want to do, we just need someone there to help us get there, and make sure we're doing it while following our school's vision. 

One of the best things about life is change, and my job is constantly evolving.  In order to keep up with this, I need heaps of PD, and I'm reading as much as I can.  Currently I'm reading this book. 

amazon.com

I'm trying not to think of myself as "just" an Edtech Coach, but as a learning coach. While I don't have the whole skill set yet, it's something I'm working on. 

One of the most important concepts that this book made me reflect on, and I use in my EdTech job is the importance of trust.  Moving to a new school means the first thing I have to do is build those relationships with teachers.  I'm going to a lot of meetings, listening and supporting, and finding out what they think should be happening.  By listening and then acting, I'm hoping that the teachers will know that I have their backs when they want to try something, so that when I want to encourage them to go somewhere new in their learning journey, they'll know I support them. 

 Some rights reserved by torbakhopper

I think it all goes back to the sense of community and connection.  If we all feel like we are connected, and we are trying to do the best for learning (students' and ours) then we need to be open to some direction.  Any kind of peer coaching can be helpful.  

Getting into classes this week was amazing. So good to see happy kids, and inspired teachers doing their best. We're starting individual student blogs in the next couple of weeks, working on class blogs and storytelling apps this week. All in all an exciting time to be working with teachers.

Consuming or Creating or Both

 Some rights reserved by barbourians

I was reading George Couros' blog today about "work phone mentality", while I always enjoy his blog posts, this one really got me thinking.

At my previous school, before we introduced iPads to the classroom we gave them to our teachers for six months.   The first two months were playing, and like Couros mentioned, not everyone played. Some people used it for personal communication, some looked into how they could use it with students, but I guess everyone who used it thought about how they could use it to enhance their teaching (which is great).  But I don't think anyone used it to try to create something (myself included).

Consuming
I don't think we were solely consuming (or we were aware of solely consuming), rather I think so much of what we know as educators is to consume and adapt. Rarely are we asked to create change, or stimulate change (well in our students yes, but in the system? I don't think so).

For the past two years as an EdTech coach, I've been asking teachers to create rather than consume with their learners.  And I fully support that idea today, but I think I've missed out on some of the benefits of consuming, or I've been using the word improperly or just leaving off the creating aspect from consuming.

Consuming, creating and the commons

 Some rights reserved by The Daring Librarian

While I often think of the potential of creative commons, I don't always think of it as a tool for both creating and consuming (although now that I think of it, I can't actually imagine it any other way).  Coming from a constructivist view point, I believe we build on from our previous knowledge, besides direct experience and then consumption (reading, watching, listening, interacting) to other people's experience, I don't know what other ways we can acquire knowledge.

As I head into my classes on digital citizenship, and crediting sources this week, I really want to highlight this opportunity to consume and create for our whole learning community. 

Making Parent Communication Folders

Screen Shot by Maureen

This week our team has been focused on creating a presentation for delivering information to parents.  Before we sent out numerous links for parents, but most of our parents received and email on their phones and clicked links to access the information.  Their phones opened many new tabs which made browsing difficult for them.  So we decided to use a different approach this year. 

Since we are using Google Apps for Education, we decided to create folders where parents can view the information being sent out through one main folder.  When they open the folder they get subfolders which will bring them to curriculum, media and single subject teachers. 

As a tech team, this seemed pretty straightforward, but we all learned a lot when trying to share the message to administration and grade level teams.  While sharing settings were easy to manage and control with a small group of people, it was more difficult when using the same folder in multiple drives (for our grade level teachers), we worked with the sharing settings making people editors for a short period of time and then making them viewers only. This way we could manage how the drives were organized.  

More than anything, as an EdTech team, but mostly I learned a lot about breaking steps down and differentiation.  One of the teams was very comfortable using Google Drive and blogs and they flew through the presentation in fifteen minutes mainly concerned with our privacy settings and size of the drive. Another group (much larger) took an hour to get set up.  Some of this was due to our prep, but some of it had to do with the comfort of using the drive.  I learned a lot about the importance of knowing your audience.  Since I'm new to the school, I had prepared a uniform presentation, but as I am getting to know the groups better, it's important to start changing how and what I present (all best practice really, I guess this is just pre-assessment). 

I have two more presentations to go, but I feel much more prepared for sharing the information, and hopefully making it more meaningful to the teachers. 

Next comes the parent step (well a week from now).  It will be interesting to see how well the information gets from one place to the next.  

Back to School

 Some rights reserved by BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives

Well summer was full on, read a lot but didn't create very much.  Going through the presentations we are giving this week and next week, our EdTech team keeps talking about the powerful learning opportunities with creation. Sadly, I've been out of that loop for the last couple of weeks. 

While we dive into all teacher training next week, the teachers new to the school are getting ready this week, figuring out systems, learning the school, interacting with each other, so far so good I would say. 

I bought some screen casting software recently, and want to take the plunge into offering more personalised learning opportunities for teachers, not just with content but with time. I've talked about this but at times teachers feel like there is not enough time. 

 Some rights reserved by Sergey Galyonkin

Part of what I see as my job this year as EdTech is to promote this idea of a "flipped classroom" using screen casting opportunities, an having my google calendar open, I hope will create a way teachers can either access me during the day, or access learning material in the evening, or on the weekends (not that I want people working all weekend, I just want them to be able to learn whenever they want to learn).