Reflecting on the Year

With the birth of my second child, the last year has been my primary focus. However, I am slowly getting some time and energy back to work on this blog. I have my goal setting meeting shortly so I thought I would stop and reflect on my year as a Technology Integration Coach and Specialist Team Coordinator. One of my goals revolved around helping and documenting how students use feedback to improve learning. This is definitely still a work in progress. Instead, due to school-wide goals, we focussed more on improving student reflection and encouraging students to dig deeper and make more thoughtful posts. I have worked with teachers and students on this goal. We also needed to better articulate our digital citizenship outcomes and the plan is set for next year to work on this more. We definitely have a clear articulated plan but need to work on following through.  Another of my goals was to find authentic ways for specialist teachers to collaborate and grow professionally. I feel that I have helped in some ways by coordinating our weekly PGCT sessions and including specialist teachers in these meetings. We worked on making units more conceptually based but still have some more work to do with this. My other goal was to embed technology/information literacy in classroom practice and driven by units of learning. I feel that I have made most progress on this goal since we now have many units documented in Atlas that are technology-rich units. There is some work and room for growth in lower ES units but we are getting there. We are starting to see innovative practices coming from teachers and this is always a strong indicator. Highlights of the year:

• Updating the TIL standards and benchmarks and coming up with a detailed plan for digital citizenship for next year.

• Helped specialist teachers improve with conceptual-based planning and assessments

• Helped specialist teachers with improving reflection by using Seesaw and giving specific feedback to students

• Worked with integrating Art in a Gr4 unit-Turtle Art project

• Helped support lower ES teachers in using Seesaw more effectively

• Embedded technology and design thinking into multiple units this year (Gr4 Energy, G3 Forces, G1 Sound/Light, G2 Farm to Table, G5 The Island, KG )

• Finding ways to innovate and test out new ideas (Turtle Art, Green screen projects in G5, QR codes for book reviews, Design thinking project in Gr5, Minecraft projects)

• Continued to develop Tech Crew program for G5 students and leadership and have student-led assemblies

• Coordinate annual Maker Days

• Continued to maintain and give students opportunities to use Makerspace in authentic ways (maker mornings, lunchtimes, passion projects, etc)

• Continued to meet with teams on a regular basis to plan and collaborate on technology-rich units

• Communicate and collaborate with TICs and tech staff to ensure classrooms have proper infrastructure and hardware to support learning

• Support teachers and students transitioning to Macbooks and iPads through ongoing PD

Need to start doing:

• Build on finding authentic ways for specialist teachers to integrate in units

• Find more ways for authentic design-thinking projects for students

• Collect more data/feedback on seesaw (parents/students)

• Continue to capture feedback on student learning

• Find ways to build flexibility in schedule to allow for more personalized learning in technology

• Offer more support sessions