Advancing Technology: Building Capacity, Initiating Inservice, and Sharing the Love at the Redwood Writing ProjectSummary
This minigrant proposes to share the joys and responsibilities of site leadership with Redwood Writing Project TCs who revel in the technological. “Advancing Technology” is a multi-staged project, one that builds incrementally upon structures currently in place—an established leadership team, a revamped website, a functional blog, and a nascent wiki—to create ever-widening support structures for continuity, inservice delivery, and site administration. It is a plan for an advanced technology institute that empowers a tech cadre and that eventuates in ongoing technology inservice for classroom teachers, and it is supported by collaboration with three other Writing Project sites initiated at Tech Matters 2006.
Project Description
Radical site budget cuts forced radical site staffing cuts which forced radical site leadership restructuring which took a lot longer than it should have and which heaved us, blinking and breathless, into an NWP-sanctioned reorganization year. From those birth pangs, however, has emerged an amazing six-person Leadership Team: experienced and new TCs working side by side to learn the business and resurrect the site. From those birth pangs, we have learned that no one person has to accomplish everything on her own, that others are available, eager, and able to shoulder responsibilities. We are now committed to building leadership capacity so the work we do is not limited by either our number or our imagination.
To that end, the Leadership Team has scheduled a retreat to which each of us will bring two TCs interested in lending their expertise to more specialized tasks. For instance, I am recruiting two tech-savvy TCs who will form RWP’s new Tech Team. Ultimately, this Tech Team will plan and implement a week-long invitational on the Humboldt State University campus (with its free facilities access) during which techie TCs can share what they know, learn from each other, reflect on their practice, and develop workshops for sharing their best tech practices with other teachers—all the elements of our Summer Institute model. During this Advanced Tech Institute, we will begin with what we know. We will think about how we learn. We will think about what questions we have. We will find good reading and post it and read it and respond to it. We will each commit to trying one new thing. We will develop workshops. We will coach each other. We will plan a year-long inservice series and determine how best to sell it to schools. We will send two or three of our best workshops to the Summer Invitational Institute. We will post our workshop materials to the site blog, and we will contribute to the site wiki.
How the Project Meets Grant Criteria
Furthering Site Core Work and Priorities
The proposed project infuses technology into three of the four core areas:
• Summer Invitational Institute: Advanced Tech Institute fellows will support the SII in both form and content by presenting demonstration workshops that address technology-supported instruction. In addition, technology content can serve as a recruitment tool: enticing applicants with new content and with opportunities to meet California state standards for teacher and student technology proficiency.
• Continuity: The Tech Team and the Advanced Tech Institutes will provide both new and long-standing TCs with an opportunity to continue to enjoy the support of the Writing Project.
• Inservice: The Advanced Tech Institute will not only fuel TCs; it will also become the basis for a subsequent year-long inservice series focused on technology. The series will offer much-needed quality professional development delivered to teachers by teachers, and, again, it will provide a vehicle to achieve California technology-education standards.
• Technology Liaison as Site Leader
My role in site leadership has never been tenuous: I have long served on advisory boards, event-planning and continuity-coordination teams, and institute leadership. The proposed project provides an opportunity to expand technology leadership capacity; it will also insure that both administrative and inservice technology needs are met.
• Broadening Technology Liaison Network Knowledge Base
While attending Tech Matters 2006, Paige Baggett (Mobile Bay Writing Project, AL), Cynthia Calvert (Alcorn Writing Project, MI), Jason Shiroff (Denver Writing Project, CO), and I (Redwood Writing Project, CA) formed a networking group we dubbed Common Threads. In addition to supporting each other as we embark upon similar projects, we are looking forward to sharing the fruits of our collaboration by going public: we have already scheduled several Skype sessions for developing a proposal to NWP’s 2007 Annual Meeting and for penning a subsequent article (for The Voice, The Quarterly, the TM06 blog, or local site venues). Writely will serve as the platform for that collaboration—a platform to which other TLs have access. Common Threads humbly suggests that given the recent TLN attention to tech teams, other TLs might find some useful information, inspiration, and/or cautionary clues in our work.
Participants in RWP’s Advanced Tech Institutes will also post their workshop materials—including bibliographies—to our site blog, effectively forming an eLibrary to serve teachers and TLs alike and to entice RWP members to their site’s blog.
Timeline
Please note that I am committed to play an active role in each of the teams listed below. As the Tech Team evolves, individual members will assume primary responsibility for emerging tasks—brochure design, blog management, and the like—and that evolving responsibility will be reflected in the Three-Month Progress Report.
| Activities | Responsible Individuals | Anticipated Completion Date |
| Begin Leadership Retreat Planning | RWP Leadership Team | August 3, 2006 |
| Finalize Leadership Retreat Planning | RWP Leadership Team | October 4, 2006 |
| Leadership Retreat | RWP Leadership Team, Tech Team, and Inservice Teams | October 21-22, 2006 |
| Advanced Tech Institute Planning Session | RWP Tech Team | November 2006 |
| Common Threads Meeting in Nashville | Common Threads | November 17, 2006 |
| Advanced Tech Institute Planning Session (Including Needs Assessment) | RWP Tech Team | January 2007 |
| Three-Month Progress Report | RWP Tech Team | January 31, 2007 |
| Advanced Tech Institute Planning Session (Including Nominations and Promotional Materials) | RWP Tech Team | February 2007 |
| Skype Conversations with Common Threads Team | Common Threads | March 2007 |
| Advanced Tech Institute Planning Session | RWP Tech Team | April 2007 |
| Leadership Mini-Retreat | RWP Leadership Team, Tech Team, and Inservice Teams | May 2007 |
| Skype Conversations with Common Threads Team | Common Threads | June 2007 |
| Advanced Tech Institute | RWP Tech Team | June 2007 |
| Advanced Tech Institute Debriefing | RWP Tech Team | June 2007 |
| Selected Demonstration Workshops for Summer Invitational Institute | Advanced Tech Institute Fellows | July 2007 |
| Technology Inservice Menu Brochure Production | RWP Tech Team and Advanced Tech Institute Fellows | July 2007 |
| Final Report | RWP Tech Team | September 1, 2007 |
| Publish Workshop Materials and Annotated Bibliographies to RWP Blog | RWP Tech Team and Advanced Tech Institute Fellows | Academic Year 2007-2008 |
| Technology Inservice Series | RWP Tech Team and Advanced Tech Institute Fellows | Academic Year 2007-2008 |
| Skype Conversations with Common Threads Team | Common Threads | September 2007 |
| Skype Conversations with Common Threads Team | Common Threads | October 2007 |
| Present at NWP Annual Meeting | Common Threads | November 2007 |
| Publish Article | Common Threads | December 2007 |
Dissemination Plan
In addition to the delivery systems described above—making collaboration sessions public, presenting an Annual Meeting session, publishing an article, and establishing an eLibrary on the RWP blog—the proposed project provides for local dissemination via SII workshops, an RWP technology inservice brochure (electronic and print), and event descriptions on the RWP website. Finally, the RWP Tech Team and Advanced Tech Institute fellows will continue the work begun at TM06 on Geek Goodies, a wiki devoted to celebrating all things techie, nudging it ever closer to the rich national resource it can be.
Final Report
Briefly describe the proposed plan of work. Please restate the goals your site had for this work and describe the progress you have made in accomplishing them during this period of time. Attach any documents, materials and resource links that have been developed or distributed that might help to illustrate your work.
This minigrant proposed to share the joys and responsibilities of site leadership with Redwood Writing Project TCs who revel in the technological. I envisioned “Advancing Technology” as a multi-staged project, one that would build incrementally upon structures then in place—an established leadership team, a revamped website, a functional blog, and a nascent wiki —to create ever-widening support structures for continuity, inservice delivery, and site administration. I envisioned an advanced technology institute that would empower a tech cadre and that would eventuate in ongoing technology inservice for classroom teachers. I also knew I could rely on the supportive collaboration initiated at Tech Matters 2006 among three other Writing Project sites.
| Goals | Progress | |
| G.1 Recruit, nurture, and sustain a site Tech Team | Mission accomplished. RWP’s Tech Team is four strong, and I am confident that several of this year’s ATI participants will join the ranks, organically, as a result of the follow-through eSessions and workshop presentation opportunities/requirements in their future. | |
| G.2 Plan and implement a week-long Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) | Mission accomplished. Eight TCs--four participants, three facilitator-participants, and I—all spent three days in June and three days in August enjoying RWP’s first ATI. Follow-through eSessions and dissemination requirements will follow. | |
| G.3 Support the Invitational Summer Institute and develop a tech-focused inservice series with workshops developed during the ATI | Mission marginally accomplished; progress ongoing. Two Tech Team members presented a workshop at our ISI’s Guest Day, and ATI folks are slated for two tech sessions during the ISI’s Spring Conference, but this is the current extent of our intersection with our core program. ATI facilitators and participants alike have committed to presenting a tech workshop at a venue of their choice—a baby step we anticipate will grow into a full-blown inservice series as well as to future ATIs and increased ISI integration. | |
| G.4 Develop a library of tech-focused information on the site blog | Mission not accomplished. We learned quickly that the blog is not the best venue for the eLibrary. We are using the wiki and the ATI blog instead and reserving our site blog for its original purpose: the ISI’s eAnthology. | |
| G.5 Grow the site wiki | Mission marginally accomplished; progress ongoing. GeekGoodies has become the repository for the resources ATI participants are collecting for their tech projects as well as a narrative that will evolve into a tips section. | |
| G.6 Continue collaboration with CommonThreads colleagues and publish the results of our collaboration | Mission accomplished. Without these wonderful people and their frequent encouragement and inspiration, insights and contributions, the RWP Tech Team would never have accomplished its goals. CommonThreads have accepted a flattering invitation to present at the 2007 Annual Meeting, and we have been keeping a record of our progress on GoogleDocs with an eye to eventual publication. | |
We know that unexpected challenges and circumstances occur in our work. We are interested in learning about the struggles, challenges, and questions that have developed from your site’s minigrant project. What changes, if any, to the original proposal were made? What have you learned or how has your thinking been affected as a result? How might these insights affect future work?
C.1 A Less-than-Tech-Savvy Tech Team
I had hoped to recruit tech-savvy TCs to the RWP Tech Team, but while the folks who accepted the invitation are admittedly tech curious, they initially functioned more as a leadership team than a tech cadre. Consequently, the ATI became by necessity The Tracy Show; at the same time, the team was invaluable in shaping the experience. I got to focus on setting up the blog and writing GoogleDocs directions and the like because the team nurtured the Big Picture and made sure I didn’t pummel participants with technology. They also performed a surprise metacognitive function: helping us all to learn more about how to learn more about teaching teachers to teach with technology.
C.2 Recruitment
I was astonished when inveterate techie TCs, people I know personally and with whom I have happily worked in the past, refused the invitation to join the Tech Team; I was shocked when these very same smart, capable, friendly people even refused to return phone calls and email messages. I need to find out what I’m doing wrong on that front. . . . Fortunately, their unavailability made the current, wonderful Tech Team possible, so I am more than happy. (I would still like to find out what I did incorrectly, though.)
Following the advice a presenter offered at NWP’s 2006 Annual Meeting, I decided to hand select participants for the inaugural ATI, and I decided to keep the participant cap low, at 6. I was also adamant about selecting those participants from our TC pool: I wanted to focus on teaching with technology with folks who had already benefited from the Invitational Summer Institute. In May, we had a full complement from the full grade-level spectrum. Unfortunately, two succumbed quickly to overobligationitius, but four was a good number for us this year: our Tech Team facilitators needed almost as much support as our participants, and we could offer one-on-one support.
Several non-TCs in our service area were interested in the ATI, at least one of whom participated in the ISI this summer. This new TC has a guaranteed spot in the 2008 ATI, but the challenge now is how to keep her hooked and how to support non-TCs and/or non-ATI participants without simply offering a watered-down version of the ATI. Site directors, Tech Team members, and I are working on this “good problem” (NetHeads, for instance, and maybe a tech strand).
C.3 Configuring the Institute
Initially the Tech Team envisioned a week-long session in June for our ATI, but once we developed our goals (outlined at the end of our Advancing Technology Workspace GoogleDoc), we discovered that vision’s impracticality. Five consecutive days works beautifully for tech-junkie TLs at a Tech Matters Institute, but RWP’s less experienced, less confident participants needed an introduction to the Wide World of Technology and gentle, friendly immersion followed by time for personal research/practice before developing a tech project to launch with their students in the fall.
So instead of one week-long session, we realized that we needed three days in June for the Tech Team to offer its workshops based on our own tech projects and to ready participants for conceptualizing their own projects, for a baptism-by-fire episode wherein we threw participants into the deep end of the tech pool, sharing lots of tech resources and supporting them as they learned how to use most of those tech goodies. Then we needed three days in August, after participants had reflected and researched and practiced on their own, to help them shape the projects they want to run during the fall 2007 semester, effectively guiding them through the process the Tech Team experienced:
Between October 2006 and June 2007, team members planned and launched a modest tech project for application during the spring semester of 2007. One team member and I launched wiki projects. Another team member, who runs a writing center during the school year but teaches a writing class during the summer session, planned a new tech application to launch in June. Our fourth member experienced difficulty isolating a project and, ultimately, shared a collection of tech-related instructional strategies from her current repertoire (PowerPoint, Microsoft Word tools, etc.). We supported each other during our respective testing phases during our monthly meetings, and we each developed a workshop based upon that project for the June portion of the ATI. In that way, we modeled both the project itself--wikis, online peer response, blogging--as well as the making/doing project process.
So during the first ATI phase, team members helped ATI participants to embrace some new technology and to research their own projects.
During the August session, we helped participants plan their own projects, which they will pilot during the fall semester of 2007. During the spring semester of 2007, the Tech Team will help participants to develop and deliver their own workshops based on those projects (delivering their workshops is part of the contract they signed to get their stipends). In short, we will recreate for ATI participants the Tech Team's own process/progress. Ideally, those workshops will become the basis of the ATI 2008. We'll blend participant and Tech Team workshops into a year-long technology inservice menu and start the process all over again (with appropriate modifications, of course, learning from our mistakes and miracles).
One of my concerns is continued funding for the ATI and for the Tech Team. Perhaps in the future, without a TM minigrant to supplement site funding, we can present the ATI—without stipends—as a prerequisite for membership on the Tech Team, and team members can pull a stipend. I am in negotiation with RWP directors and Tech Team members to find creative solutions to the money shortage.
C.4 Vast Range of Tech Knowledge among Participants
One of our ATI participants is exceptionally experienced. I think his umbilical cord came equipped with a mouse port. For much of the institute, he was a blessing, and he cheerfully supported his fellow participants when I couldn’t respond to the raised hands quickly enough. We were all quite grateful for him, but I worried that the ATI was little more than a reiteration of what he already knew—with a stipend. Happily, I was wrong. At its most fundamental level, the ATI gave Mr. Tech Groovy valuable, concentrated opportunities to develop the tech projects he’d long longed for—the greatest gift a Writing Project event offers, in my opinion. I was also surprised when he latched on to the one team-member project I was convinced would scare everyone off (a valuable lesson in humility for me). Another participant, someone fresh from two digital storytelling workshops, is so tech clumsy, she can barely navigate email. She is an exceptionally talented teacher and author, but she has trouble locating the big, red switch on the computer. She gamely tried on all the technology we sent her way in June, but for someone whose email attempts are only 50% successful, our first three days together left her tense and, sometimes, defensive.
Fortunately, this wide range—the Do-All and the Dread-All and everyone in between—helped us all to consider audience and the ways in which we can fashion workshops interesting, applicable, and available to all abilities ranges.
C.5 My Own Tech Shortcomings
Two participants are interested in digital storytelling—a subject about which I know little—and we learned early that these women need to find their support elsewhere, not with me. They have both attended workshops and created digital stories, but their learning curve is still quite steep, and added to the pressure of their own interest is the hunger from other participants to craft their own dStories, to learn more about this medium. Instead of castigating myself for my own lack of knowledge and scrambling towards the nearest crash course, as I am wont to do, I suggested an Expert Export to the CommonThreads contingent, promising that if one of their techies could support my digital storytellers, I would support one of their techies with a project with which I am conversant. That eTrade is currently in the works.
C.6 Tech Project Development
(I should know better, but) I am surprised at the number of revisions required to launch a successful tech project. In the fall of 2006, I offered a wiki-project option to my critical writing students (for information about the most current iteration of this project, please follow this link); three students accepted the challenge and crafted their Critical Writing Wiki. While I was proud of their product, I was disappointed at the wiki’s scope: it offered a distillation of our course text, not a compilation and synthesis of information available outside our bindings. That was my fault, I know, because I wanted to see what would happen if I abdicated control, so I didn’t establish a strong enough platform from which the students with whom I work could leap.
For the spring of 2007, I platformed the heck out a wiki project for my first-year composition students—a project that started out mandatory and became optional, a transformation about which I will spare you the details. I established guidelines, followed them myself (Tracy's Dangling Participles Page), revised the guidelines, and set my students lose. (Follow this link to see what they accomplished.) Once again, I was both contented and concerned. These wiki pages functioned as wiki pages: annotated compilations of related sites. Unfortunately, they look remarkably like my sample page. They met the minimum criteria I set only because I insisted that they do so, and no pages exceeded those minimum criteria. This semester, in its third iteration, the wiki project for my first-year composition students is tied to their definition essay. I haven’t completed the assignment/project yet, but when I do, I will post it here. By December, the wiki page associated with this newest project will be available by following this link to wikiDic.
With all this in mind, I do not think we paid enough attention to help participants to fashion their own tech projects in the August ATI session. Instead of distributing a (very helpful) handout and explaining its purpose, I think we need to devote an entire morning or afternoon to completing the worksheet—that or distribute the worksheet sections throughout the August session. Perhaps, too, we can make the completed worksheet the first follow-through assignment. I will consult with the Tech Team on this issue. We are using GeekGoodies: A Collection of Technology Tools for Teachers by Teachers that I first launched at TM06 in Chico to collect our research and resources and to record our progress. This platform will eventually serve as a specialized eLibrary.
C.7 Budget Changes
Our reduced number of participants and the remaining participants’ interest in purchasing texts to support their progress (even though the Net is bulging with online texts!) suggested a reconfiguring of the stipends proposed in the original budget. Each participant and Tech Team member received a $50 supplement. We devoted a portion of our budget to supplies, coffee mugs, gum, and key chains that functioned as a combination door prize and let’s-keep-this-green-and-liquids-out-of-the-computer-labs deal. (I am proud to announce that everyone brought her/his mug to every session.) I also drew a bit of a stipend to reflect a percentage of the additional time I devoted to this inaugural session. Finally, we offset processing fees.
C.8 Configuring Tech Worskhops
Early Tech Team meetings were spent determining what, if any, differences exist between a tech workshop and a traditional 90-minute ISI-style workshop. Some team members insisted that a best practice is a best practice, whether it includes technology or not, and that it is more dangerous to send out an undertrained response-group facilitator, for instance, than an underexperienced blogger. Others, myself included, maintained that a tech workshop is a special animal, one that requires all the elements of a successful ISI-style workshop as well as ample time to become conversant with the technology. Experienced teachers already know classroom-management and essay-response practices; they do not necessarily already know how to launch and manage a wiki.
After I consulted with TM06 and CommonThreads colleagues, I was able to share their collected wisdom with the Tech Team, at which time we determined that tech workshops require a minimum of two hours, are best delivered in a computer lab, and must include time for participants to practice the technology.
Then, in July, one Tech Team member and I presented a 75-minute blogging workshop for the ISI’s Guest Day. Already you can see that we broke all three of our cardinal rules. While the workshop was marginally successful, it fulfilled only one of our goals: sharing the uses of blogging. Based upon post-presentation reflection and participant feedback from the blogging workshop, the Tech Team is beginning to draft a tech workshop manual of sorts: a guide to crafting successful tech workshops. It takes more than one workshop to author a manual, of course, so we’ve adopted this as a long-term project.
In what venue(s) can you imagine sharing what has been learned through your minigrant project (i.e. conference, workshop, publication, discussion forum, other)?
In time, GeekGoodies will function both as a repository of resources for those interested in technology-aided instruction and as a library of suggestions from those who have undertaken the technology described there. Finally, the RWP Tech Team plans to offer a how-to guide for delivering technology workshops available for adoption and/or revision to other NWP sites.
Discuss future plans to complete, follow up, or build on the work of your minigrant project. We are especially interested in hearing about the ways in which this project helped to increase capacity and build leadership at your site.
In many ways, I feel we have only just begun; at the same time, I am proud of the progress the RWP Tech Team has made this year. We conceptualized and accomplished our first tech institute, we brought some latent leaders back into happily active duty, and we revitalized some resistant TCs back into the fold and into leadership roles. Already, new TCs are lined up for ATI 2008.
RWP site leadership has been extremely supportive. We meet Thursday to discuss the best way(s) to spend the limited funds directors have earmarked for tech endeavors, and ISI directors have made room for us in their spring conference—an event that will serve as combination recruitment tool, inservice delivery, and presentation practice.
I am absolutely confident that the momentum we generated this past year will carry us well into the future. One of the many benefits of any tech project is the trail it leaves: the availability of that trail and the foundation that trail lends to future projects. The ATI 2007 blog stands as both record and as draft for ATI 2008. GeekGoodies continues to grow (albeit slowly); GoogleDocs allows us to ruminate and to share those ruminations.
When I arrived at TM06 last July, I was a wilting ball of desperate, guilty resentment (and that was before I stepped off the plane into the Chico heat!). I felt responsible for tech EVERYthing at RWP and capable of so very, very little. When TM06 facilitators asked participants to craft their inquiry question, I wrote “How do I keep track of all the new stuff? How do I filter? How do I try everything? Isn't this a full-time job? I still can't get the RWP blog working like a blog should! . . . The thing I really want to write is how can I get out of the way responsibly? How can I recapture the joy of discovery in such a way as to include others in that joy and to get them to want to include others?” Now, fourteen months later, I look around and smile because I am learning the answers to most of those questions. You all gave me the time and support to do what I knew needed to be done, what I wanted to do—the greatest gift a Writing Project event bestows. You gave me CommonThreads (the amazing group of TLs who gave me the courage to step aside and the strength to step up), and you gave me a bunch of very cool tech tools.
You made the TL role fun again. I can never thank you enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment