District Wide Training for Teachers and Staff Completed.

We have just completed a two day training class on moodle and Google apps for education. Everyone had the chance to attend four three hour sessions. The session titles were:

1. Basic moodle - Setting up a class and learning to share resources.
2. Advanced moodle - Learning how to use moodle to assess student learning.
3. Google email - Learning how to use email, calendars and groups.
4. Google docs - Learning how to create, share and collaborate using documents and sites.

It was fantastic to see over 50% of the teachers give up two days of their summer to come and learn with each other. The level of energy that I felt in each of the 6 classrooms was phenomenal.

Looking back at the survey results and feedback from everyone here are some of the major learning's:

• The six hours for the Google mail and docs sessions was a perfect amount of time. People had time to play around with and use the various tools. Overall people had a high level of success.
• The six hours for moodle was not enough time to become a master on the topics. People had time to see and understand what moodle is, but more time is needed to support the development of resources and assessments in moodle.
• Some people need more help in authoring content to be placed on their moodle class site. (Creating PDFs, converting image formats, editing video, screen casting, podcasting, etc.)
• Since all staff and students will have access to Google Apps it provides a common platform will everyone can communicate. (Students did not have access to exchange.)
• Using mini-lessons helped everyone to see how to use the tools in a classroom/school environment.
• People felt the training was more valuable because the training was provided by teachers in the district.
• Some people felt that smaller bits of this training over time would be more effective.
• When doing moodle training in the future we need to make sure to tell teachers to bring class resources that they could use to build their class.
• Moodle training needs to be broken up into much smaller sections. Let the people experience the part of the tool, let them create using the tool, let them test each others tools.
• Training needs to better group people by ability and readiness to learn a topic.
• Need to continue training process with support during the school year.
• People enjoying the engaging nature and structure of the classes.
• Having support instructors in each class would be helpful to deal with issues in the class.

Planning Planning Planning

This is the start of a blog that I hope to use to capture the progress of a school that will be going through a major transformation this year. I will try to share the good of what works along with what is not working so that maybe other may be able to help us.
In order to improve student achievement and engagement I will be working with the following tools.

• Google Apps for Education. (Major training and roll out for Sept 1)
• Moodle. (Entering my 5th year, this year will help others to get it rolling.)
• PowerSchool.
• Drupal (Portal, System Integration.)

My current task is to develop a set of questions that can be used in an interview format with teachers to help access their comfort with new and existing technology in the school and how they use it to improve student learning.

What questions would you ask teachers?