Professional development and technology

I'm fortunate to be working in a district that values professional development, collaboration, and technology. Mesh those together and you have half of today's non-student day. Our learning centered around OneNote from Microsoft, essentially a digital version of a binder with assorted tabs. Using OneNote will hopefully allow for more transparency in collaboration, keep people engaged when they aren't able to meet in person, and increase productivity. How? Ideally your team would meet, talk about students and goals, and establish a to-do list for what you are going to implement in your classroom. From there you can revisit those goals and to-do's, and see where your team is with respect to meeting them. That is the ideal of course, and I'll be interested to see how that works out over the course of this year.

I also stumbled across this post on This Week In Education. It started me thinking about a statistic that I heard at today's training: if you were to use your Activeboard (or SmartBoard) during 70-80% of your instruction, and couple that with good pedagogy and best practices, then you'll increase student achievement. I forget how much, but I was more than a little surprised (and I'd also like to see who funded the study, always important). The statistic came from Marzano, so I'll try to find it.

On one hand I was excited. I have a ton of tech resources at my disposal such as computers, an activeboard, digital cameras, hi-speed internet access, a document camera, video cameras and my laptop. I need to find ways to better integrate technology into my teaching, and ensure that I am NOT letting the tech be the focus (Note: I use it daily, but not as efficiently as I could... lately using the activeboard to have kids highlight main ideas in texts was fantastic). But what I wonder is how much tech exposure kids need to have in order for technology to really have an impact? Would those schools with less technology, such as my student teaching site in Seattle, have the same result? Or would the lack of tech exposure (and the newness of it) circumvent those gains? Maybe it would simply slow the statistical benefit. All very interesting.