ICTeD Services

A School's eLearning Planning - The Magazine Article

I've been asked by an Educational Technology Solutions magazine to write an article on the eLearning Planning of my school. Nice to have my stuff on this picked up by them on Google. See http://www.ictedservices.com/eLearning_Planning.html. It will be interesting writing the 1500 words, as it will have to summarize the journey the school has gone through over the past 18 months. I will need to contact the Victorian Department of Education & Early Childhood Development, [DEECD], re: the availability of the eLearning Planning Guide & Matrix to a wider audience. And then write the article. Also need to check out some back issues of ETS & their style guide!

Working Title: How to write a great eLearning plan for your school….and why your school needs one!!

Breakout: Now all this expenditure [on ICT in schools] we would want to be able to demonstrate that we there are improvements to student achievements and learning. But can we if fact, do this? Or is this great amount of expenditure just being spent with little monitoring?

Resources:

DEECD Resources for eLearning Planning for Leaders

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/studentlearning/elearning/planning/default.htm

Williamstown Primary School eLearning Plan 2008-2009

http://www.williamstownps.vic.edu.au/docs/eLearning%20plan.pdf

The DEECD ePotential Continuum

http://epotential.education.vic.gov.au/continuum.php

Postscript: looks as though it has been accepted, with a publication date of early next year!

ICT Scope & Sequence for Primary / Elementary Schools /3

Developing a sustainable, useful and practical ICT Scope & Sequence for my school has required a lot of thinking & development. The direction of the  school' s ICT Scope & Sequence has come from its eLearning plan 2008-2011. [See http://www.ictedservices.com/eLearning_Planning.html and my blogpost of 18.02.2009 for what has happened before in this process.]

To make a plan that will be used by all teachers, enhance current curriculum planning, reflect the Victorian Essential Learning Standards for ICT, lead to useful assessment tools and be manageable has been a challenge.

However, I think we have now developed a useful model. This has used the planning documents of the Grade 3/4 Professional Learning Team [PLT] as a starting point.  I have used their current documentation for term 2, 2009 [which finishes in three weeks]. After meetings in the last week with both the Grade 3/4 and Grade 5/6 PLTs, they have both agreed to try the model next term.

So this is the model [no rocket science here], but I think an improvement on many of the ICT Scope & Sequence documents I have read, which imply that:

1. The teacher, teaches only ICT and is obsessed by checklists and spreadsheets [and is armed with a clipboard 24/7, monitoring and recording every time a student right clicks to get a contextual menu etc.]

2. The teacher has the post doctoral qualification necessary to understand the terminology of the Scope & Sequence document.

3. In reality, the teacher will be overwhelmed and will use every excuse possible to ignore the document.

So what is our school's ICT Scope & Sequence process [ based on the 3/4 & 5/6 PLT planning documents]

1. We get each PLTs Annual Planner [an A3 sheet and highlight any references to ICT in any subject/ domain]

2. We then get each PLTs Term Planners [A number of A4 pages of the activities to teach each VELS domain & dimension made at the end of the previous term]. Here is a Download Term 2 34 2009 of the ICT related parts on the Term 2/2009 3/4 PLT Planner. Highlighted parts relate to the explicit teaching of ICT.

3. I've created an ICT Scope & Sequence proforma / document for the 3/4 PLT with the following features:

• The extent of the school's ICT program P-6

• The applications / Web 2.0 Tools that need to be taught in the 3/4 Scope & Sequence for this term, related to the activities that have been highlighted.

• A matrix placing the activities to be taught [from the PLT planning documents] under the 3 dimensions for ICT for the 3/4 PLT [ICT for Visualising Thinking, ICT for Creating & ICT for Communicating]

• The one ICT activity is highlighted in each ICT dimension

• A three stage assessment rubric has been made for each highlighted activity

• A list of ICT skills that require specific teaching is extracted from this matrix

• These ICT skills are listed on another matrix, as to who will teach them, [ The ICT teacher, the Librarian or the classroom teachers]

• A list of the Professional Learning requirements on those staff who will teach those explicit ICT skills are then listed. There are a number of modes of delivery for this, i.e. external provider, demonstration lesson, mentoring, peer teaching, or professional learning session in a PLT meeting.

Documents:
Download ICT Scope & Sequence 3_4 T2_2009  Scope & Sequence model
PowerPoint Activity about Australia Planner #1 #2

As usual for my blogposts, I will report back later........

ICT Scope & Sequence for Primary / Elementary Schools /2

I wrote a number of blogposts last year about coordinating the development of my school's eLearning plan and one of its targets which was the development of a school scope and sequence charts in ICT. These charts would be lists of ICT skills and activities for students K-6. These would show development of skills not only between year levels, but also be the means to monitor some progress by students during a year. The scope and sequence charts were to relate ICT skills to learning activities and be the basis for school written progression points in ICT. The scope and sequence charts were also to indicate which teachers were responsible for teaching and assessing what. A progress report on this was made at the VITTA Conference in November, 2008. You can read about what happened up to this stage on my website. After I spoke at the conference I got back the ICT scope and sequence ideas from each professional learning team [PLT] at my school. Despite common input at a curriculum day, the range of responses by PLTs  to wtiting these charts was wide ranging. Some responses were in my opinion, not a useful way to go! They included things such as skills charts, not related to learning activities, gripes about resource allocation and copying and pasting for the VELS ICT standards. I really felt we weren't getting anywhere. However, one team came up with what I think will be a great model for writing ICT scope and sequence charts in future. Their process was that they went back to the previous term's planners, thought about what they wanted students to know and then developed some flow charts. I've started to put these on to Gliffy. Here are the first two. [ I'll add the rest over the next week.] There is a planner for using PowerPoint in an Animals unit of work and another on using spreadsheets to make graphs [Maths]. They also wrote mindmaps on Desktop Publishing [text documents], Student webmail, homework skills and 2D and 3D shapes, Congratulations to that PLT for doing such a great job.

Creating a New Image on School Intel iMacs [with Windows Partition using Boot Camp]

I've spent today rebuilding the image for the 30 iMacs in the ICT Teaching & Learning Centre of the school that I work at. My first effort, [in February this year], was a bit rushed. It had to get a working Tiger [10.4] image completed for the new facility very quickly. However, it worked and my lessons with whole grades of Year 2-6 students started [up to 29 students and their teacher] shortly after.
To establish a baseline of ICT skills for students at my school [using explicit teaching], I developed ICT Foundation Studies, a 12 lesson unit [for all students 3-6]. Year 2s had an introductory 5 lesson unit.

 

As successful as this was, upgrading to Leopard [10.5] & adding a Windows partition to the 30 iMacs was nagging at me.
Why?
Students would love the added features of PhotoBooth using Leopard [incl. green screen].
Students were now prepared, after Foundation Studies, to use 10.4 in their classrooms, but 10.5 in the ICT TLC. [And it just looked cooler to them!]
Also, more than half the teachers at my school now have Leopard on their MacBooks.
So I upgraded to 10.5.
But today I started to rebuild the entire image [on a single iMac] with a Windows partition [20GB] using Boot Camp.
Why did I do this?
No, I haven't fallen in love with Windows!
In fact the process took a whole day to make a Boot Camp partition, add 10.5 Boot Camp drivers, install Win XP SP2, install the latest Windows Updates [102 updates], Symantec v.10 and Office 2003. [Creation of a Net Boot image with the Windows partition & all the 10.5 stuff still to come, but hopefully to be rolled out next week, using Carbon Copy Cloner]
So why did I do this???????
Well, it is almost the end of the school year in Australia [Dec. 2008]. Grade 6 students are then off to secondary colleges [the end of primary/elementary school].
So, some may have never used a Windows environment before and most secondary colleges in Victoria are Windows environments! So with the Windows side to the iMacs [and using Boot Camp], I can teach them some basic Windows skills in the next few weeks.
[No other reason, really .........truly..........ruly!!]

[As with any software recommendations in my blog, what I write about is my opinion only and I take no responsibility for anything going wrong with your computer, server, network etc.. Please read the conditions and product disclosures and EULA for each application. Always exercise care and caution!]

Developing a School ICT Scope & Sequence /1

Last Friday was my school's Curriculum Day [a pupil free day for teacher professional development]. The first session was to start the next part of the school's eLearning plan. I firstly presented a progress report on our agreed targets for the first half [2008 -2009] of our four year eLearning plan. This was very pleasing with most of our strategies being at least started, but with also a number completed. See the color coded attached PowerPoint.   Download elearning_plan_progress_blog.ppt
As for the ICT scope and sequence, which this was going to be the product of each professional learning team [PLT], the librarian and myself [as ICT coordinator], there were two critical things we needed consensus on. Firstly, there needed to be an agreed format and secondly, it had to be user friendly, not a large checklist, but more to indicate the progression of ICT skills in the context which engage students and enhance teaching & learning. This became the agreed position of my colleagues after my presentation, [see below to download my presentation]. It was agreed that the rubric format best served this purpose. PLTs began work on their individual scope & sequence charts, and while not finished on the day, they are a work in progress for completion over the next weeks.   Download ict_s_s.pdf

ICT Coordination: What's in the job?

Here's my job of ICT Coordinator as a mind map. [I'm an ICT coordinator in a state primary school with 550+ students. The School is located in Victoria, Australia.] View the mind map at http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1435019/.

ICT Coordination at a Primary School

As part of a school eLearning Plans I've used Gliffy to map the tasks involved in school ICT Coordination. While not completed at the time of this post will be a useful starting point for discussions. Will post link here when complete. Thanks for the comment Debi K from Gliffy. I'm glad you are following the use of your product. I like it so much I've signed up as a premium user.