Monday, January 27, 2014

Duties of a Technology Coordinator:

As instructional technology continues to emerge and change education, it's important to reflect on the individuals who take part in this process.  Technology coordinators play an important role to enable schools to successfully integrate technology.  However, just what does a technology coordinator do?  If one searches online job descriptions for technology coordinators, one encounters a varied and expansive list of duties and responsibilities.  To better understand this question for myself, I decided to interview the technology coordinator for my district.

Before meeting for the interview, I created a mind map that I felt encompassed the major responsibilities of a technology coordinator.  I used mindmeister, which is a web-based software program that can not only be used to create mind maps, but also collaborate with others in real time.  Embedded below is my pre-interview mind map on what I thought I knew about the many duties of my district's technology coordinator.
Create your own mind maps at MindMeister

The interview was enlightening and I was able to really understand the impressive, and likely overwhelming, duties of a technology coordinator.  The overall duties were largely distilled into six components:
  1. Maintenance of district hardware, software, & network:
    • A little over 900 total students & 62 full-time teachers
    • 520  total students with devices (middle & high schools 1:1 with iPads & laptops)
    • 1,500 total devices for the district
  2. Procurement and planning for the future
  3. Staff development & training
  4. Management of district data & personnel 
  5. Tech first responder (fixing anything & everything tech related)
  6. Tech diplomacy (cultivating a culture of openness & innovation)
For a deeper understanding of these six components, I created a post interview mind map to better demonstrate the insights gleaned from the interview with my technology coordinator.  Furthermore, here is the link to the Google Doc that contains my notes from the interview.



Create your own mind maps at MindMeister

When comparing the two mind maps, it's clear that the interview provided a far more nuanced understanding of the duties my technology coordinator is responsible for.  My initial concept was very much centered around the maintenance and procurement of district technology.  Of course, the reality is far more complex as evidenced by the two different mind maps.

The emphasis on staff development is a component that my technology coordinator really enjoys, but it's also something that requires more attention in order to effectively integrate technology throughout the district.  The day to day maintenance of technology is something that I found the from the interview that really consumes time that could be spend helping teachers improve their instruction.

Our district has hired a tech specialist to assist our coordinator with the maintenance of the technology and network.  This has allowed our tech coordinator to focus a bit more on tech integration and staff development, but more still needs to be done.  The possibility of hiring a specific tech integrationist would largely move our current tech coordinator into more of a director's role focused largely on district wide initiatives instead of working with teachers to successfully implement technology.

As far as words of wisdom, my technology coordinator had three really perceptive insights:
  1. It's important to line up philosophically with district administration.  This is something that I feel could either cultivate or kill the ability to integrate technology within a district.
  2. Be firm, but not dictatorial.  Whenever interacting with staff, it's important to compromise and develop plans that all parties are comfortable with.
  3. If something fails, don't assume it's your fault.  It's always important to take an objective view of a problem and consider all of the possibilities in order to arrive at a solution.
Despite the intimidating list of duties that comes along with being a technology coordinator, the capacity to help lead education into the 21st century is undeniable.   However, the expansive duties of the position can at times distract from what is necessary to create any type of positive instructional metamorphosis within a district.  To achieve this goal, focus must be placed on the successful integration of technology into a district's curricula instead of simply procuring devices and increasing bandwidth.  Ultimately, districts must clearly delineate the role of technology coordinators to focus on staff development, or hire integrationists who can work specifically with teachers on improving instruction.



Monday, January 20, 2014

Teaching with Avatars & Thinking About the Future:

It's time to wipe off the layers of digital dust accumulating on this blog.  As I finish the Instructional Technology masters cohort at UNI, it's time to think about how I'll apply this to my current position as an educator.  In many ways, I have a hard time imagining myself outside the classroom, but I do enjoy helping fellow educators successfully integrate technology.  Many possibilities and opportunities certainly exist.

To better convey my thoughts my feelings, I created a talking avatar using Voki.  It's a bit limited (no beard option, which is disappointing) with the free version, and if you follow this link you'll find that there are many other options out there for creating avatars in the classroom.  Below is a link and an embedded video of the Voki examples I created.

Voki allows users to create talking avatars and link to them.  You can follow this link to the first Voki I made that discusses how I plan to integrate avatars into my own classroom

Also, Voki gives users the opportunity to embed avatars into a website such as a blog.  The embedded Voki below expresses my thoughts on my future as an educator.

What My Future Holds: