2 1/2 Months Later...

It's been about two-and-a-half months now that I have going to a local middle school once a week to provide professional development sessions on integrating technology into their specific curricular areas and the district's new lesson structure model. This experience has definitely been eye-opening! As a whole, the staff was pretty comfortable with using technology for themselves but were not very comfortable allowing students to use technology, which is the intended goal for the massive amount of money spent on classroom technology. I am glad to report that both teacher comfort allowing students to use technology and actual student use of technology went up in this very short time frame! A few things to note:

1. While more teachers were allowing students to use technology in class, the number of classrooms using technology did not go up. In other words, the same amount of classrooms had technology use occurring, but more of if was student use rather than teacher use.
2. I feel a large part of this success is due to the fact that the instructional coaches jumped right in with both feet on integrating technology into ALL professional development.
3. While survey results would lead one to believe that student engagement went down, I don't believe that is actually the case. During the course of this semester, the definition "actively engaged" was clarified to the staff members. I believe this is why the results showed a drop in students that were actively engaged, as all conversations with staff members indicate that students were more engaged in the learning. 

Teacher Survey Results

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Overall I think that the work done this semester was beneficial to all involved and I hope that the coaches will be able to continue to support technology integration into their professional development sessions and that the students will benefit from this experience.