In this digital age with the abundance of social media and circulation of information, it has never been more essential to network effectively and send positive messages. A few weeks ago I came across this image showing vintage social networking and was quite amused to see how communicating has changed over the years!
I am a high school business teacher and also teach Marketing, Technology, Law, Planning and Grad Trans at Langley Fundamental Middle & Secondary School. For over a year my various Marketing students and I have
I work closely with Marc Bourget who is a Technology, Earth Science and Geography teacher. Marc and I decided to take on this task of being Digital Literacy Coaches and together we have already seen steady progress with our colleagues using technology.
We started our roles by devising a plan with aims and objectives. One of our goals was to implement the School District Initiative of “Tech Time” in our staff meetings! We each gave ourselves a challenge for October and November 2013. This was to support one staff member who reluctantly used any form of technology and help them overcome some of their fears. Here are a couple of our success stories to date:
During our last staff meeting we encouraged two middle school teachers (Brenda and Shirley) to demonstrate the use of document cameras and ipads (using the Reflector App) to project their teaching. They were able to show labs, formulas, equations and have kids clearly see what was happening in a lab. They explained how they were able to walk around and have students share their work, while other students could still see instructions and guidelines on the projector. Now I see Brenda and Shirley continuously ask students about their iphones and ipads and they always want to keep updated with technology. Brenda has now created her own Twitter account and reads her incoming tweets regularly! This is a breakthrough and now both Brenda and Shirley are keen to incorporate more technology into their practice.
Marc and I continue to receive interest from staff members who want to implement new technologies into their teaching and we look forward to networking with them. This is just the beginning!