21st Century Team

The York School Department has established a 21st Century district team. This team is a compilation of different administrators, tech. integrators, and a variety of classroom teachers that span the entire K-12 perspective from all of the schools within our district. Members were asked to apply for the position in the spring of 2009 and the Superintendent of Schools, Director of Technology and Curriculum Coordinator met to establish the team and coordinate the first introductory meeting in the fall of 2010. In our first year, we really tried to establish what 21st century skills look like for York teachers, and every member was given an iPad by the district to play and learn more about how mobile technologies can promote problem solving and 21st century skills on the go. It took the entire year really to establish our mission. We met once a month during the school year, to understand our goals and to really identify what we wanted to do in order to help move education in York into the present and hope to look towards the future.

 This has been a real frustration for many members, as things were discussed and sorted out, but rarely was a true decision made by the team at any given meeting. We all wanted to move forward, but were not sure that the group, as a whole, knew how or could agree on what it was that needed to be done in order to do that. Unlike other district teams that I have been on, within this district and in others, there was no real target to shoot for or goals/steps to check off as they were completed. We were treading in open water. There were certainly some resources that have helped pave the way, or shed a little light towards a distant end of a tunnel, but it was tough to take a step without knowing where we wanted to go in the first place. For this reason it has been a slow process.

 This year's goals for the team are to create windows of how teachers and students within our district are already using 21st century skills in-and-out of the classroom. Hopefully with these examples published, other teachers, community members, administrators and school board members will understand what it is that we are looking for and trying to achieve. It's a good first step anyway. Another big goal for the team this year is to plan out a full day teacher inservice centered around 21st century skills. This presents an interesting issue and potential problem. In the past, this inservice day has been designed around technology as a whole, and in more recent years, technology as it integrates within everyone's curriculum. Inservice days are always met with mixed emotions by the staff. Time is always an issue in education and giving a teacher some time without students can truly be beneficial if the day is planned out correctly. In the past few years, teachers have not seen these inservice days as planned out to help them, but rather as one more thing on their plate that caused stress and anxiety. Technology integration, in my eyes, should not be counted as "one more thing" as in many cases it is already happening all over the place, but I do see how one can be concerned with a new set of skills that are needed in order to manipulate the technologies to fully engage students and bring about higher quality of work and thinking. I'm just afraid that a day labeled, "21st Century Skills", even though we are 11 years into the 21st century already, will be looked at as just one more thing to add to the overcrowded teachers' plates. So how do we create a day, centered around 21st century skills that will be met by teachers with excitement and a sense that it can be accomplished without adding too much? It's a daunting task for sure, and one that I fear may take a lot more meetings then we have time for. Do you have any ideas, or have you created something like that in your district?

 The third and final goal for our group this year is to create a base line online professional development course for all educators within our district that clearly label how York would like to continue with 21st century skills, and provide opportunities to the learner to research, examine, play and reflect on web 2.0, mobile, and other technology tools that can enhance the teaching experience and therefore the learning of each and every student that walks through the doors within the York School Department. I've taken several online courses, as I am finishing up my masters degree in the Technology in Education program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, many of the classes are setup in modules in which we were asked to research how a task could be used in class, read examples of potential outcomes, create a product or task for our students to try out and then reflect on the outcomes. These are all good practices, but each tool that I have used was the focus of the task. Teaching technology tools are great, but in order to promote 21st century skills and also hopefully only have each staff member take the course once within their tenure here in York, we will need to make it more of a theory and methods course. Heck, the way technology changes and improves, by the time the teacher taking course learns how to Tweet, we may have a better way to communicate in a similar way. I'm reminded of how I felt when I heard the Flip camera was no longer going to be manufactured after spending 4 professional development days with staff showing them how to use the technology and import the footage into a video editing software program in order to publish their masterpieces to the web. Again this will be a difficult task. Has anyone out there created a baseline class for either tech. integration or 21st century for education staff?