What kind of professional development gets teachers using technology?
My experience shows that the best thing that we can do is to include students in the process. That’s a simplistic way of saying it, but once we really embraced that idea, the rest of it just fell into place. You can attend the most wonderful workshop and learn something new and exciting – how to design a web page, wonderful links to other web pages, how to teach kids how to search meaningfully. But if you return to the same old situation, you can feel really frustrated. Everything just gets filed away. We’re finding that if we bring students along, as we go to the workshop we’re saying, “How can we really make this work?” You have a critical mass of people who understand what’s going on. They go back to their schools, and it’s not just one person. What can administrators do to support what you’re doing? Understand and support the cultural change. Our former principal took the Gen Y class — he came at 7 in the morning because he wanted to learn the tech skills and be part of the whole e
