Walking the Talk with Technology
Everyone has heard of the saying, if you Talk the Talk you must Walk the Walk. We’ve modified that at CATEC this year to say simply….Walk the Talk.
Today as part of our bi-monthly Tech Tuesday, our faculty and staff meet to review and get hands-on practice with tech tools to enhance teaching and learning at the school. Today we focused on the use of GoogleDocs, using Excel-like spreadsheets, to provide both a form for teacher goal setting and a form for tracking student performance in each program. After our 45 minute session this morning our teachers (who have been working on Goggledocs for over a year) were able to use these documents and share with others.
Not only will our faculty and staff be using this method of reporting for tracking personal and student progress but they will also be creating GoogleDoc sharing opportunities for their students. These ideas will be worked on until our next meeting in two weeks.
All of our data analysis work this year will be in the form of PDSA which stands for Plan, Do, Study, Act. For student progress checks, the teachers have provided info on the Study to start (how are kids doing) and have now developed an ACT (what can we do to help). This info is also shared with other resource personnel to have more of a collaborative team to assist the student who may be struggling.
Lastly, today we also had teachers assign a student as a Tech Leader in each program area. This student will start by getting training in the use of a FlipCamera and filming a process or demonstration in the classroom. Our hope is that they will be able to train others students and assist the teacher in providing a new means of capturing and learning at CATEC.
One step further along in Walking the Talk.
