Nancy Devine´s most recent blog post.. Who tweets more…

Melanie Holtsman´s most recent blog post.. From PLN to P-L-A-N for Moving our School Forward

Been away as a reader for a while, new baby two months ago (making 2 under 2 years)… and grad school is killing me.

That said- Interesting post to come late to. The train of commentary here makes a pretty prophetic post of this one.

I can identify with a lot of this. Actually- I left the classroom full-time three years ago as a generalist instructional coach. I now teach Dual-Credit Biology during one period (with marine bio as an additional night course) of the day… and work on staff development issues throughout the rest of the day.

Almost a year ago in April, I was given sort of the “go ahead” to focus my job more towards tech integration within my high school building. I was allowed to pull together a “coalition of the willing” -of sorts- consisting 20 staff. We purchased MacBook Pros, digital cameras, iPods… and then took off on building PLN’s and becoming tech-savvy adults before thinking of tech-integration with students before we knew what we were doing.

In that one year… I wrote my first blog post in April, didn’t even write one in May… slowly built a head of steam… you helped directly with 30DTBBB… created http://virtualsouthside.ning.com … http://thesynapse.ning.com … http://mwsu-bio101.ning.com … blah blah blah. And that is just a drop into the bucket of immersion from this past school year.

I am now on a district-level technology think tank aimed at developing a mission for the future. It is a pretty exciting time to be in a fairly open-minded school district. The remaining 60 teachers will come online with our 1st cohort this summer. We are pretty excited.

I think the reason I have bypassed the “grass is greener” syndrome here is the fact that I was pulled out of full-time teaching prior to this year. I had already felt the sting, as well as the beauty, of viewing classroom instruction as it looked outside of the four walls of my classroom. Therefore, this year, all of the digital connectedness did nothing but enhance my efforts.

I think the real key here is that my district was wise enough prior to implementation of our coaching model in secondary schools… to require that we keep one full class of students. The keeps us grounded with all of the grading, accountability, march toward standards, etc., that all teachers face.

It also gives us a “lab class” that allows us to truly find out what works before dumping a pile of new things out onto the entire staff. Honestly- I think this is key. Any district thinking of pulling teachers completely out of the classroom for any staff development purpose, be it instructional, technology, etc… should really really stop and consider allowing these top professionals to hold on to at least a sliver of the job that brought them into the business in the first place. It just makes sense for too many reasons.

Does juggling all of this at once drive me extremely crazy? Of course it does. However, to have no classroom duty/responsibility/creativity/inspiration is to be far too out of touch with the real world of education.

Sean Nash´s most recent blog post.. What does the “Information Superhighway” really look like?