Collaborator

From "The ISTE Standards" (2018):

Teachers dedicate time to collaborate with both colleagues and students to improve practice, discover and share resources and ideas, and solve problems.

2.4.a. Dedicate planning time to collaborate with colleagues to create authentic learning experiences that leverage technology.

In the 2021-2022 school year, we added over a dozen SMART Board interactive touch panels to our classrooms, giving our teachers and students yet another avenue to pursue teaching and learning with technology. Since I was responsible for the purchase and support of these devices, it was very important to me that my colleagues were confident in using the boards to their fullest potential. To achieve this, I worked closely with a number of my colleagues to adapt their current lesson plans to the Lumio software platform. This site allows teachers to create engaging lesson flows that combine content delivery with real time assessment and practice activities for students. With their own device, students can follow along with the lesson, completing teacher-designed activities along the way.

I worked alongside our middle school science teacher - historically an avid PearDeck user who was becoming increasingly frustrated with that tool - to teach him all of the features of Lumio and get his PearDeck lessons and activities transferred over to the new platform. He now swears by it. Every day, he can be found using a classroom set of Logitech Crayons for students' iPads to deliver an engaging Lumio lesson.

2.4.b. Collaborate and co-learn with students to discover and use new digital resources and diagnose and troubleshoot technology issues.

During the 2018-2019 school year, I mentored a student interested in pursuing a career in information technology. As I was new to the field myself, we undertook several collaborative learning experiences to include reading texts, participating in labs, and taking practice exams. At the end of the school year, we traveled together to take the CompTIA ITF+ examination and we each received the certification. The student went on to major in Information Systems in college. Click below to view my certificate.

2.4.c. Use collaborative tools to expand students' authentic, real-world learning experiences by engaging virtually with experts, teams, and students, locally and globally.

The use of video-conferencing software in education exploded in 2020, but even before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was using Zoom to bring the world to my rural students. In 2019, when I taught a computer science course for the ESU #11 Summer Honors Program, I arranged for my students to have a Zoom meeting with Hexel Colorado, a personal friend and professional software developer from Texas. In our meeting, Hexel answered a number of student questions and shared information such as:

What his job was like day-to-day
What he needed to know/skills he needed to have to be successful
How he decided to pursue software development as a career
What the interview and job search process was like

My students gained a real-world perspective of a career in computer science and were able to meet a young professional who was becoming a leader in his field.

2.4.d. Demonstrate cultural competency when communicating with students, parents, and colleagues and interact with them as co-collaborators in student learning.

In the TE 878 course, I created a presentation for a school board proposing the adoption of adaptive learning technologies for personalized learning. In the course, a board of my peers evaluated my proposal and deemed it worthy of approval. This is only one example of a school board presentation that I have designed; others that I have actually delivered to my school board have resulted in similar feedback. Communicating well with all stakeholders about the current and future impacts of educational technology will be critical to ensuring that my school is on the cutting edge of innovative teaching and learning.