Continuing the series of interviews with technology directors and integration specialists, who give their "state of the union," and their views on education technology in the future.
Jack Leiman, Instructional Technology Facilitator at Tacoma School District
“We’ve gone from being non-users to saying, ‘You need to look at this!’ It’s made our job a lot easier—if someone asks me how to do something, I send them the video links. They ask if they can call you, but they never call back if you send them the right videos. Now we’re saying, ‘Guys! This is an amazing tool!’ It’s not just the videos, but the standards, the workshops. We have an equity problem now because kids have more technology in their pocket than they’re being allowed to use in school. We’re getting to where, when they walk in to a building, it doesn’t make any sense to them why should they be doing stuff where they can do a lot more things with their friends. We need to be the leaders on this and ask, ‘How do business and politics make good use of these tools? It’s not just social. It really does work well for individualized learning.”
“I’m looking forward to linking it to student accounts, where a teacher can assign several videos. Because it’s available 24/7, we can get rid of a lot of the ‘how-do-you-do-this’ stuff and spend more time on creativity. Teachers are freed up to ask their students, ‘Why are you writing this? Why are you creating this?’ That’s where I’m hoping it will go; more on creativity and getting things done well. I also see our online resources being more mobile. You can’t be good at everything. You get to a certain level of expertise and you head off in your own direction. But the resources are always right there. When we get stuck, that’s always the first place we go—and we’re the trainers!”
P.D. Tips courtesy of Atomic Learning
