NOW Classrooms Leader's Guide. Meg Ormiston
book is not about educational technology as an end in and of itself; it’s about transforming the entire culture of teaching and learning, and technology forms only one part of that overall change. One of the key purposes of this book, then, is to help school leaders completely shift the conversation about technology adoption, moving it out of the technology department and instead working to include all of the school district leaders in a collective vision of change.
As we walk around the building as school leaders, we hope to see groups of students collaborating and creating using technology. What we don’t want to see is students or teachers using technology for low-level tasks that aren’t directly tied to instruction. For example, we don’t want to stop and talk with a group of students about what they are learning, only to have them answer us with the name of an app and nothing more. What we do want to see is students using technology in varied ways to meet learning targets, collaborating with one another, and connecting with students and professionals outside of the school walls. When asked what they are learning, students should tell us about content or skills, not tools. A school must start by devising a vision for teaching and learning. Once that vision is in place, it’s time to look at ways to incorporate technology appropriately, using digital tools, apps, or websites to enhance the essential lesson. We cover this visioning and implementation process throughout this book.
This Series
This book, intended for school leaders, is one book in a five-part series. Practicing educators in the Chicago area wrote the other four books. One of our authors, Meg Ormiston, had already written several books before she approached the rest of our collaborative team of twenty-six coauthors about writing this series.
Early in the process, we decided that the project would comprise five books: this one, which is primarily directed at school leaders, and the other four, which are practical, grade-band books for grades K–2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–12 teachers. Although the content in each grade-band book is different, they are all structured in the same way.
Many schools have added technology into classrooms without seeing student engagement increase. To avoid this issue, we decided to focus heavily on lessons that teachers could begin to use immediately to transform the learning in their classrooms, without necessarily requiring a technology upgrade. We know from our work in schools that teachers and students are at a variety of skill and comfort levels using technology, so we designed our books to meet people where they are and help them develop new skills, ensuring that the focus remains on the quality of the teaching and learning.
Each of the lessons includes age-appropriate technology tools organized using the NOW framework.
• N stands for novice
• O stands for operational
• W stands for wow
Teachers can select lessons in various sections depending on the learning objective they want to achieve and their students’ sophistication level with the technology tools involved. For example, in NOW Classrooms, Grades K–2, there is a photography lesson titled Snapping and Sharing Photos. It includes the following NOW lesson structure.
• Novice: Taking Pictures With a Camera App
• Operational: Sequencing Pictures
• Wow: Demonstrating Learning Using Pictures
Teachers may, of course, modify the sequence of these lessons to better meet their specific instructional goals. In addition to the lessons, the books provide content connections to all subject areas, including special subjects such as art, music, and physical education. The books also contain classroom management tips, ideas for communicating with parents, teaching tips, and advice on technology use.
Each chapter in the grade-band books ends with a series of discussion questions. The books are not research heavy. The lessons and discussion questions are based on our personal experiences in schools and classrooms. We believe that the discussion questions are valuable for ongoing personal professional development, as well as helpful for clarifying innovation plans. Professional development teams might also use these questions during late-start mornings, early-release days, or other time blocks devoted to on-the-job embedded professional development. They can be useful for personal learning networks as well.
Unlike the grade-band books, this book is specifically structured to help school leaders create and sustain systemic change.
This Book
We have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in the process of incorporating technology in schools, and, in this book, we’ve tried to share our practical, honest experiences with the change process and offer real stories drawn from our journeys. Each of the educators involved with this project started with different challenges: demographics, technology, teachers, curriculum, culture, communities, or administrators. That diversity of experience helped this book avoid becoming merely the story of one district and its specific challenges.
We designed this book so that each district and school could customize its basic framework to meet its specific needs. The process we describe—the why, the what, the how, and the then what, followed by any necessary rethinking or revision of any of the pieces—may not happen at the same pace, scale, or sequence in all districts. Changing any educational system is complicated. Our hope is that you will find success in helping your team look beyond the technology tools and stay focused on answering teaching and learning questions by deploying the following framework on which we structured this book.
• Why?
• Seeking support
• Establishing the visioning process
• What?
• Communicating the plan
• Creating teacher activators
• How?
• Defining and deploying personnel resources
• Defining and deploying technology resources
• Defining and deploying financial resources
• Then what?
• Implementing professional development
• Connecting the community and showcasing student projects
In this book, chapter 1 starts with the vision itself, or the why, which is the most important part of the entire process. The important parts of the framework include the process of seeking support from key stakeholders who will support your innovation throughout its implementation, and the visioning process itself. This chapter also discusses the idea of a growth mindset, which is critical to any innovation’s success, as well as the SAMR model (Puentedura, n.d.) for designing and assessing learning opportunities. SAMR, which stands for substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition, is a reflective model intended to help educators integrate technology in purposeful ways.
The planning continues in chapter 2 with the what. The key parts of this stage involve communicating the plan to staff, stakeholders, and all other involved parties, as well as creating a small teacher-activator group to begin implementation. This is where the vision from chapter 1 begins to flesh out and the innovation starts to take some serious shape. This chapter also introduces the idea of getting it out the door.
Chapter 3 investigates the how. This involves defining the essential resources for the implementation of your plan—personnel resources, technology resources, financial resources—and deploying each to good effect.
Chapter 4 discusses the then what, a topic that our team believes is a too-often neglected aspect of