Leader
From "The ISTE Standards" (2018):
Teachers seek out opportunities for leadership to support student empowerment and success and to improve teaching and learning.
2.2.a. Shape, advance, and accelerate a shared vision for empowered learning with technology by engaging with education stakeholders.
As the technology advisor to my school's Continuous Improvement Process Steering Team, I have served on committees to develop new vision, mission, and belief statements for our school. Through collaborative discussions with other committee members as well as through perceptual data obtained from students, staff, and community members, I developed the wording for the vision, mission, and belief statements in the document below (click to view).
2.2.b. Advocate for equitable access to educational technology, digital content, and learning opportunities to meet the diverse needs of all students.
When I researched and designed an ICT curriculum, its teaching methods and learning materials were selected specifically to reduce stereotype threat and increase access to technology resources and skills for students from underrepresented demographics. When my district selected new formative assessment tools, we identified and adopted adaptive learning technologies that met the learning needs of all students wherever they were in their academic achievement. When I have recommended the purchase of certain devices or software platforms, I have made it clear that our investments represent a social responsibility of the public schools to provide students computer literacy, digital citizenship, and computational thinking skills to students who do not have access to technology outside of school. The profound mission of the public school system is to provide a base of knowledge and skills to any student, regardless of their background, that will enable them to be creative and productive members of society. The way we implement technology has a direct impact in our increasingly diverse and interconnected world.
2.2.c. Model for colleagues the identification, experimentation, evaluation, curation, and adoption of new digital resources and tools for learning.
In the TE 878 ("Leadership in Instructional Technology") course for the Instructional Technology program at UNK, I developed this EdTech evaluation tool that is designed to model for teachers the process of determining whether a given digital resource or learning tool is adequate for adoption into a school system. The framework requires teachers to evaluate the resource or tool according to seven factors on a sliding scale:
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Transformative teaching and learning
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Accessibility and ease of use
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Cost, procurement, and maintenance
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Digital citizenship considerations
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Efficiency and streamlining
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Professional development needs
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Data security and interoperability
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Click below to view more information about the framework, including a link to the tool.
