Our Instructional Technology Team held its second meeting on November 10th. We were pleased to welcome Dr. Tara Nattrass back to facilitate alongside Kara Beal and Kevin Hustek. As you may recall from newsletters last school year, Dr. Nattrass is an Education Strategist with Dell Technologies and is a free resource available to our district. At the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year Dr. Nattrass began working with our teams to build out a collective Instructional Technology vision. While the pandemic temporarily brought our work to a halt in the Spring, we were excited to resurface the work at our recent meeting. The team spent time reflecting on our current instructional practices, how things have evolved over the last eight months, and where we would like to go from here.
A couple highlights of innovations our team shared
- Consistency in Platforms: No more shifts from one platform to another - Teams, Schoology, done.
- Schoology: Entire educational community, from students to parents, feels comfortable and confident utilizing the LMS. This is a big improvement over last year.
- Access to Professional Development: Staff members have made videos to help each other, students and parents. In addition, we have been able to access to PD across the nation that has been put online and we would not have had the opportunity to attend those before.
- Microsoft: Students using their Microsoft emails, Word, PowerPoint, etc and being able to upload those and share them with teachers after completing work!
- SEL Check-ins: Teachers and staff checking in on students in academic and social-emotional capacities.
From there, our team broke into groups by level (high school, middle school, and elementary) and began discussing and entering input on our vision for classroom technology, specifically AV needs. This information will become a key component in the classroom AV enhancements that will be rolled out in the coming summers thanks to the 2020 bond program. Our team members were encouraged to take this information back to their individual building level teams to continue collecting and synthesizing input from all levels. The deadline for providing input is Friday, November 20th.
Our next virtual Instructional Technology Team meeting is scheduled for December 8th from 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm. If you have any interest in joining the next meeting alongside our team, email Kevin khustek@mywwps.org or Kara kbeal@mywwps.org to be added to the next virtual meeting invite. We love the collaborative nature of this team and would love to have you join a meeting 😊
