So I thought this blog would come in handy! Thought i would share my preliminary thoughts on the Professional Learning Goals Program that I am planning for next year. The assumption that I am making is that we expect our students to create learning goals and measure whether they have met them or not to help them become life long learners so why not teachers?? My scope is the development of teachers in ICT integration and use but I am hoping that is could be used for all areas of a teachers growth. So the plan thus far is by using a Ning staff will join a learning community within the school and post answers to a series of questions via a blog either on the ning or RSS’d (what is the past tense of RSS?)  to their ning page on the goals that they would like to set for themselves.I will then meet with each staff member to help develop a plan of action to help them achieve their goals, which will include after school training sessions, external PD’s, readings, peer reviews, mentoring and joining a professional learning network. Staff will then need to blog their progress and reflections at least 4 times over the year (obviously they can do more but that will be the minimum) and to utilise the features of the ning to collect evidence of their achievements e.g uploading photos, videos, documents, commenting on other’s pages etc. (It is also a sneaky way to get staff to use some web 2.0 technology and hopefully begin some collaboration and conversations!) I will also meet with staff over the year to chat with them about their progress. Staff will be encouraged to set goals that are meaningful and relevant to their teaching and needs.

So I am hoping this will work and these are just my initial thoughts. I need to work out what will happen if staff don’t work on their goals at all. I need to work out what the questions will be. Anybody see any other glitches, flaws, suggestions needed???

Well today our ICT committee meet to review our 5 year strategic plan for ICT across the college. It has been a year since we developed the plan and I cannot believe the incredible learning curve that I have been on. The college too has seen some great changes we have Interactive Whiteboards, teachers and students using a variety of blogs, staff increasing their ICT skills, Photo story being used, teachers who had never used technology starting to use technology and think about it, we have networked the college and have a very high uptake on staff laptops. It has been great. But there is still some areas that I would like to see change in. Number one is staff looking at teaching and learning in a 21st century context, and a movement from such a didactic model of teaching and learning to a more project based way of teaching or a constructivist approach where appropriate. The other area is the skill development of students. I am currently working on my thinking in this area. What is the best way for students to learn ICT? Is it by integrating it into the curriculum solely or do we still need specific, directed, targeted skills development? Or do we need a mix of the two? At this moment I am leaning towards having a mix of the two. I liken it to my ability to play basketball. I love playing the game but I took it up as an adult (therefore I am a basketball immigrant) so I missed out on all the skill development that I would’ve recieved as a child learning the game. I played netball as a child and therefore some of the skills are quite transferable however I find that my dribbling is well below average as are some of my understanding about the strategies of the game. I really need some serious skill development if I am ever going to play the game well. I suspect that is the same with ICT it is good to intgrate the skill developlement into projects and lessons but I wonder how much more effective student would be in their ICT use with periods of concentrated  skill development. SO we do we achieve this without teachers then falling back into old ways by saying ‘well the kids are getting their ICT in that subject so I don’t have to bother with it?’ How do we develop skills and change thinking. Most importantly how do we paln for this? So what I am looking for is students who have a great foundation of transferable ICT skills that arfe further enhanced and developed by what they are doing in their individual subjects. not asking much really! Hope my ICT committee has the answers!