Dave Cormier’s (2017) blog immediately intrigued me when he brought up tech charlatans and how they want to upsell a specific technology that will help you ‘fix’ your current education system. Next, he goes into what he has learned when implementing a digital strategy for an education system in PEI, and he first needed to build trust. While his context is in the K-12 system, I will discuss the idea of building trust in implementing technology through the lens of an early childhood educator.
Where I currently work, we do not use technology with children, but each classroom has access to a laptop to help plan and create the children’s portfolios to give to the parents. Biech (2007) brought up strategies for change, and there were two that my situation directly connected to informational and attitudinal. Working with educators in an early childhood setting, not everyone was comfortable shifting to using a laptop to help create portfolios, as many were unaware of how to use the software. Essentially, the manager had to develop a strategy to educate educators on this new software and examine the long-term issues of persuading educators to use it. Thus, similarly to Cormier (2017), the manager had to build trust for the educators to feel better about using a laptop with new software.
Finally, Cormier (2017) discusses the importance of teaching children to become digital citizens by showing them how to examine the internet critically, but what about those older generation educators who need the same lessons? While teaching children about digital literacy is important, ensuring teachers/educators have the same knowledge is also imperative. In the end, it is not only to build trust with the teachers but also to ensure that they understand digital citizenship well before they can teach it to their students.
References
Biech, E. (2007). Chapter 3: Models of Change. In Thriving Through Change: A Leader’s Practical Guide to Change Mastery (pp. 21–33). essay, ASTD Press.
Cormier, D. (2017, December 8). Our schools aren’t broken, they’re hard. Daves Educational Blog. https://davecormier.com/edblog/2017/12/08/our-schools-arent-broken-theyre-hard/
Looking back on my original post, I discussed the changes made within an early childhood context. Dave Cormier (2017) mentioned the importance of building trust and teaching digital citizenship to students. The daycare I work for has recently provided laptops to each classroom so educators can use them to plan and create the children’s portfolios. As I previously mentioned, some educators needed support in the digital citizenship area as they were not used to using technology. The educators got laptops because they helped educators be more productive, and creating portfolios became more efficient. The questions then are: How did the director decide to implement this change? What data did she use?
Because the daycare is a small company with only 15 people on staff, the director focuses more on observations and communicating with the educators. While the director does not conduct interviews or focus groups (Marsh et al., 2006), there are monthly meetings with all the educators where she asks questions about any changes or ideas to improve upon something. Thus, this is how she will collect her data to see what changes to implement. Furthermore, the changes are brought up in the meetings to see how the educators feel and if adjustments need to be made.
Regarding a teacher or learning technology perspective, her discussions with the staff could inform what direction the daycare needs to go in implementing more technology. Currently, we use laptops to plan, find activities and create the portfolio, but some ideas have been brought up to make organizing the photos for the portfolio more efficient. Another idea is to go from using Microsoft to create the portfolios and checklists to a completely digital portfolio using a different software. To plan a change such as this, I would use interviews and discussions with the educators to get their thoughts on this idea (Marsh et al., 2006). I would also use surveys to assess their comfort level for moving in a direction such as this. Surveys allow for more anonymity, so educators may be more comfortable providing their opinions this way. Moreover, the director could observe how comfortable the educators are using technology as they complete the portfolios to assess if they would be ready to move entirely online. While these are just some initial ideas, the data collection that is most useful in a small company such as this is for interviews, discussions, surveys and observations.
References
Cormier, D. (2017, December 8). Our schools aren’t broken, they’re hard. Dave’s Educational
Blog. February 25, 2024, https://davecormier.com/edblog/2017/12/
Marsh, J. A., Pane, J. F., & Hamilton, L. S. (2006). Making Sense of Data-Driven Decision
Making in Education: Evidence from Recent Rand Research.
https://doi.org/10.7249/op170
Hi Catherine,
You raised great points about surveying educators. The outreach to determine and assess their needs goes a long way in gaining their buy-in and input. I am interested in learning the best approaches to gaining that survey information. If teachers are not comfortable using computers, a survey being sent by email might not be an appropriate method. Your interview and observation suggestions will most likely work best. I am wondering if there are other methods to consider.
Also, do you have ideas on where to store this important information? Would you have privacy concerns with housing this instructor feedback? This topic can be mundane to think about but at the same time, the storing of this data can be vital to the growth of organizations.
Cheers,
Marni
Hi Catherine and Marni,
Catherine in your first post you highlight that “While teaching children about digital literacy is important, ensuring teachers/educators have the same knowledge is also imperative. In the end, it is not only to build trust with the teachers but also to ensure that they understand digital citizenship well before they can teach it to their students.” – and it got me thinking about some of the points Tracy made in our synchronous session about how we overcome resistance or convince members of our organizations that change is meaningful and in their best interests. So your plan to gather data is so important – and then to Marni’s point how do you keep this data…and then how do you then share it back so you can help build new processes or gain insight into what kinds of professional development or policy/guideline changes might be needed?