Implementation

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 * Guidelines: **Implementation: Submit the completed staff development program. It should be long enough to be thorough. When you submit the final product to me, you should also provide it to your real group of people. They can begin using the program and you can begin the evaluation phase. The final project should include at least the following items:


 * Description of the institution
 * Target audience(s)
 * Description of activities including goals and objectives
 * Description of assessment and evaluation
 * Time line for staff development
 * A portion of the individual grade for this item will be based on the feedback provided from the Self & Peer Evaluations.

For implementation, we will need to be able to present this wiki to Senn as a final product. Therefore, everything needs to look good and presentable by 11/18. It probably should be ready to go by the time Cindy implements. Therefore, we all may need to pitch in to help Latisha get the job done. -Jen

I think that the wiki looks great right now. Let's remember the focus of this work, to create the staff development. I could be wrong, but it is my understanding that this wiki is the tool that we are using to collaborate, not the final product. With that said, Latisha and the TechsQuad has done a fine job on this wiki! ~Cindy 11/7

Well, in the previous Senn course (703), he required us to submit something showing the "finished product". I don't care what we submit, but we need to submit something. I guess we all need to discuss what we want to do. I am going to send an email....Jen, 11/8

Session 1: Thursday, November 11th Session 2: Wednesday, November 17th

**Implementation ** Charleston Day School is a private day school in Charleston, SC for approximately 200 students and 40 faculty/staff in grades one through eight. The 74-year-old school is located a block from downtown Charleston and is one of the stops for many of the city horse-drawn carriage tours. Although many students walk or bike to school, others come from the surrounding area—Mt. Pleasant, Johns Island, West Ashley, and James Island. About 97% of the population is Caucasion, 2% Asian, and 1% African American. Currently, the school is expanding from having just one class section at each grade level (grades 6-8) to two sections of each grade (grades 1-5). Consequently, they are building a new addition to accommodate this growth. Many of the students are children and/or grandchildren of CDS alumni. Legacy is important and many grandparents continue to financially support the school.
 * Description of the Institution **

Rigorous academics and character development are two of the primary goals of the curriculum. The mission of the school is simple—scholarship, integrity, respect, and responsibility. Parents are supportive and students are relatively well mannered. The administrators seem determined to develop their technology program for both students and faculty. Students in grades 5-8 are each issued a laptop to use at school and can bring home for “educational” purposes. The two sections of fourth grade share a computer cart while students in grades 1-3 share a primary cart with enough computers for one class at a time.


 * Target Audience **

The thirty teaching faculty members at Charleston Day School is comprised of a variety of individuals, about half under and half over 40 years-old. Surprisingly, about one quarter of the faculty is over 50. Fifteen percent are male. Although all but one of the faculty appear to be Caucasian, during talks about inclusion, several teachers publicly talked about being from a multi-racial family. Many of the teachers have been teaching at the school for over five years. One has been at the school for thirty years. Many faculty are graduates of the school or are parents of students or former students. There seems to be a strong bond between students, parents, teachers, and administrators.

All teachers have school assigned laptops and access to SmartBoards for teaching. One faculty member is an advanced SmartBoard user, two teachers are enthusiastic users of technology in their instruction, the science teachers regularly use streamline and video in instruction, a middle school teacher is using Inspiration with her students, and one teacher is trying to use some online software to enhance math and history instruction. Many of the other teachers use the SmartBoard but don’t seem to use other technology in their instruction. Although teachers frequently ask for help with individual technology needs, few ask for more elaborate staff development. The two or three more advanced users of technology are eager to acquire new skills and technology tools.

Prior to the first session:
I requested permission from the headmaster, Brendan O’Shea, about doing this staff development for our teachers. I told him about the faculty wiki that I made and how I wanted it to be something that teachers could use for collaboration. One of his goals was for me to help develop a faculty website as part of our school website. I reminded him of this goal and suggested that engaging teachers in this faculty wiki could be a way to ultimately create the faculty website. I also told him that I was required to do this as part of my class. He agreed to schedule it and said that ALL faculty members would attend. That is highly unusual in our school for ALL faculty to attend a technology staff development.

Each teacher received an email from the headmaster telling them about the staff development.

// Dear Team CDS, //

// I want to call us together on Thursday, November 11, at 3:30 p.m. to discuss technology. Specifically, Cindy Perry will present a teacher “wiki” she has developed as a means of communication among the faculty. For instance, it is a place I could post the PowerPoint presentation I showed last Monday without clogging our email system by sending it to everyone individually. It may be a place to have links to favorite sites that you want to share with others. //

// In one hour, Cindy will introduce us to the Wiki, show you how to become a member of the wiki and demonstrate how you can edit and contribute to the wiki. // // Brendan //

As a follow up, faculty received the “invitation” that we developed for the session.  ** You’re invited **
 * To ** ** communicate and collaborate ** ** with CDS faculty using **

I’d been working collaboratively with many of the teachers and hoped that our relationship would allow them to enter this session with an open mind about using the faculty wiki in a truly collaborative way. For teachers who could not attend, we decided to have a make-up session to be scheduled after Thanksgiving. To save time and confusion at the beginning of the staff development, I uploaded all of the faculty names with a beginning password into the wiki management, making them all members of the wiki.
 * Come learn how to share your **** ideas ****, Your teaching **** expertise **** , **
 * Your favorite **** books ****, With your CDS friends and colleagues. **
 * On Thursday, November 11 **
 * at 3:30pm sharp **** In the **** library **** . Please bring your ** laptop ** . **

Preparing the room
The room was set up in the library with the big screen and projector and four large rectangular tables and chairs for learners. Each place had a session one handout, a dark chocolate Dove, and a copy of Let the Kids Do the Work (Lawlor, 2010), an article about a language arts teacher who decides to create and use a wiki with his language arts class. In this process, the teacher is surprised at how this tool not only engaged the students in superior writing but was voluntarily “managed” by the students. The article was placed on top so that the first arrivals could have something to look at before beginning.

In addition, there were place cards around the table—Inclusion, Math, Science, About Us, Book Club, Foreign Language—and one copy of all of the learners’ user names and passwords. As teachers came into the room they were told to choose a group. Having teachers sit in groups allowed for a better mixture of technology users. Earlier in the day, one teacher specifically asked me a favor—to begin the meeting on time. I assured her that the meeting would begin and end on time and kept that promise. This meant that the meeting “started” before everyone arrived.

Activating Strategy
Using a PowerPoint to guide instruction, the meeting began with an essential question, “How can we communicate and collaborate using the faculty wiki, CDSteach?” They were reminded of the four C’s—Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Critical Thinking—that the headmaster mentioned at a recent faculty meeting and how this was in line with that goal.

The question, “How can I use technology in my teaching or planning for instruction?” was presented to the group. The room was filled with attentive chatter as they discussed this question for two minutes at their tables. The movie What is a Wiki? came next and was well received. Teachers were impressed with the movie and it served as an excellent tool for discussing wikis. I reminded the learners that I was taking classes to earn my masters degree in Educational Technology and that this staff development was a group effort by our team who used a wiki for communication, planning, and collaboration. I showed them the pictures of the participants and briefly described how we worked together, using a wiki, to do create this project. As a group, we then defined a wiki, comparing and contrasting it with a blog, and talked about some of the ways that it could be used.

Instruction
At that time, we went online and looked at some examples of wikis and their different purposes. They were amazed at Jen’s wikis with the fabulous artwork! We looked at The Clarion online, our student newspaper wiki, the CDS tech wiki that I use with students, and the TechsQuad wiki that we used for collaborating on this project. The learners were directed to the CDSteach wiki and given their user names and passwords to login. The list was displayed on the projector and there was a copy of the spreadsheet on each table. They easily logged into the website. Next, they were instructed to go to the Why Technology page and select the discussion tab. At this time, they were shown how the discussion worked and asked to respond to one of the questions. The goal here was for the learners to see how easy and engaging it was to communicate online. Click here to see their responses. I walked around to help but most people were able to figure out how to do this or received help from other learners. I intended to show them the wiki or let them explore the wiki, but decided to cut back on this to move on to the group work. It seemed more important at the time for the learners to edit, upload, and insert images into the wiki.

Group Work
At this time, the learners were told about their task. The steps below were explained and displayed on the PowerPoint so that they could refer back to them.

· Create a new page · Insert a banner from the file folder (I previously made a standard banner for each page, including a “fake page” banner for those who were reluctant to create a “real” page · Upload and insert a picture from their computer, putting a caption on the picture  · Insert text by writing something  · Save the page

I demonstrated how to do each step and then they eagerly set up to accomplish this task. The room was full of chatter and active learners who appeared to be on task. Some groups split up into smaller groups and one learner chose to do a page independently. I walked around the room but they didn’t seem to need much help. One person asked if they could make their own banner and I told her that she all of the banners in this wiki needed to be consistent. If someone wanted to do something else, then that would be another wiki. Some individuals were confused as to why the captions weren’t showing up and I assured them that captions would be visible when the page was saved. I demonstrated a few special requests and the learners were engaged and showed them the Jing tutorials on the wiki. We watched about 10 seconds of one and they asked about how it the Jing tutorial worked. I gave them a quick descriptive demo of Jing. When it seemed that they had enough time to accomplish the mission, I told them that we were finishing up. One learner quickly spoke up and said that their group needed a few more minutes because they were being creative. Obviously, I agreed.

As I went to move on, again a learner requested that we share the new pages that were constructed so I showed each on the big screen. Here are links to the new pages:
 * Inclusion
 * Lowcountry Loggerheads
 * Spanish
 * Trip to Quebec
 * Science
 * About Us

I really hadn’t planned on doing that but it was obvious that it should have been part of the plan. One group, the “creative group” doing About Us, put in a hyperlinked the photo on their page to a YouTube video. Like little children, they laughed and smiled as they shared their work. Again, we talked about different ways that wikis can be used in teaching and learning.

In a serious tone, I reminded them about digital citizenship and about the need for us to be careful about what we put on the internet. Using the PowerPoint, learners viewed some serious and silly photos of the faculty learners, concluding with one teacher holding a dark brown root beer bottle at school that could easily be mistaken for beer. Fortunately they laughed, enjoying the photos and seemed to get the message about the responsibility of posting on the web.

Summarizer
Because time was dangerously close to one hour, I told them about the next optional session and goals, passing out an “invitation” to them. I reminded them of the Jing tutorials to help learn how to create a wiki. Then, they were directed to the Why Technology page to complete the online survey. Unfortunately, the survey was blocked and we couldn’t get to it. After trying a number of passwords, learners eventually figured out the correct password for unblocking internet sites on our laptops. Nine people responded to the survey at this time. The session was completed within the one hour timeframe and there weren’t any Dove chocolates left on the table.

Post Instruction
One faculty member who is more technology challenged, asked if she could also attend the make-up session so that she could have more practice. She said that sometimes it is hard for her to keep up with others but really wanted to create a wiki for her students. I was amazed at her positive response and assured her that I would work with her to create an appropriate wiki. She talked about some of the things that she thought that she could put on it. It is gratifying to be able to reach a learner who is not as comfortable with technology.

One teacher asked for a staff development session on Excel, creating spreadsheets like she saw the 6th graders doing in their class. Another teacher said that his students asked him to create a wiki so that they could publish some of their work. We talked about some different options for accomplishing this task. A fifth grade teacher has been anxious to create a wiki, but has experienced numerous problems with the students’ computers this year. She was thrilled to be part of this staff development, asking me both before and after what she could do to help. Although part of the instruction was cut to meet the given one hour timeframe, the learners were actively engaged, collaborating and communicating on the wiki. In another meeting, we can examine the wiki more or perhaps the teachers can do it on their own in a scavenger hunt. The seed has been planted and TechsQuad did a fabulous job creating this staff development.