Preparing for the First PLC
As we prepare to lead our first Professional Learning Community, it is becoming apparent how much work goes into this behind the scenes. As an individual that has sat through six to ten of these gatherings each year I always believed they were quickly put together and for the most part stress free. I’ve sat through multiple PLC’s where I believed they were the biggest waste of time. Many of those PLC’s weren’t relevant to me in any way. I was recently reading an article on technology in the classrooms. One of the most important questions that was asked was from a blogpost by Will Richardson where he asked, “How in god’s name can we talk seriously about 21st Century Skills for kids if we’re not talking about 21st Century Skills for educators first?” Click Here to access that article This is the purpose of our PLC. We need to educate our educators so they can educate our students.
Obviously, with all of this in mind I want to make sure that everyone who will be sitting though our upcoming PLC understands why Digital Citizenship is relevant and even essential to their teaching in class. I truly believe that anyone who is presenting on a specific topic probably believes that their topic is one of the most important things in education, and yet still there are those like me who sit there thinking how irrelevant the information is to my career. It is with this mindset that I started thinking about how we present our PLC to the group we were assigned. How can I make them understand the importance of digital citizenship? How do we get them to see that students leave our classrooms, and then spend HOURS using technology without ever being taught how to use that technology appropriately?
Our group got together to discuss these questions and prepare for the first PLC. Our first step was establishing the “Why”. Why are we teaching this information and what is the goal? The team quickly identified that technology is used every single day by kids and, in many cases, they haven’t been taught a single lesson about how to appropriately handle technology outside of the walls of the school building. In schools, we are able to protect our students due to firewalls, passwords that are preset, recommendations on websites to use, and areas to avoid on the internet. However, when they go home, all of those protections we provide for them are gone. They are free to roam, play, and explore on the internet without guidance and in many cases any adult supervision. This is our WHY! We need to make sure when students use the internet they are doing things appropriately. They need to be kind to others, stick up for people who mistreated, and understand the consequences of the digital footprint they leave behind. This is the first thing we want to establish in our PLC meeting with the teachers.
Next, we need to show teachers how we will teach this information to our students. In order to get buy-in for what we are presenting we decided that we also need to show the lessons they will teach and walk them through what a lesson could look like. We want to make sure they see how scripted the lessons are, which make them very easy to teach. We want them to see the design of the curriculum and the direction it will take them with each of their grades, and we want to show them the resources that are available for parent links, website recommendations, and webinars. This should help to establish the “How”.
Our last step in preparing for the PLC was establishing the expectations we have for our teachers. We wanted to make sure that the expectations weren’t too demanding, but that they also allowed us to gather the information needed to prove the lessons had been taught and that the students had learned something from the lessons. The team decided that we would have them responsible for the following 4 items:
Create and common sense media account.
Teach the first lesson in their grade level.
Have the students take the quiz.
Reflect on the lesson through a flip grid.
Our biggest fear is that the teachers will feel as though they aren’t doing something correctly. In reading about how to manage expectations, I thought the best comment came from an article called “Tips from a Tech Teacher”. Article Linked Here The tech teacher noted three things he would recommend to any teacher who is teaching technology:
Teach yourself - learning something new always takes a bit of research. Watch tutorial videos, read blogs, talk with other educators who have experience with the educational technology you are interested in.
Your students are a resource to each other and to you. Rely on them to teach other students (and you!) unfamiliar or emergent technology.
Things will go wrong. The wifi will be down, iPads won’t be charged, etc. Have a backup plan ready - a list of “unplugged” activities just might save you from a panic attack.
These are things I want to stress to each of our teachers as they start introducing the digital citizenship lessons. Overall, I am excited to see how our group of peers takes the PLC lessons. Our planning document can be found by clicking here. Our next step is creating the email and the google hangouts for everyone to participate.
