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The Toolbox contains a collection of articles with practical advice for school and classroom management.
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Getting Teachers Online
Why aren’t teachers online? Ask that question in your district, and you’ll get the same answers there as you would across the country.
Time is Obstacle #1, according to Peggy Kasten, Ohio Resource Center director. “Searching can be fun or frustrating, agonizing or engaging, but it is almost always time consuming.”
But time isn’t the only culprit keeping teachers—and their principals—offline.
Professional Development is Obstacle #2, and it probably deserves the #1 slot. Many Ohio districts have invested huge sums in technology wiring and hardware, yet relatively little in professional development.
Springfield City Schools intends to be the exception.
Springfield’s Plan: Coursework Online
- Offer graduate credit, in this case from the University of Dayton, and make the coursework doable anywhere, any time. In other words, online.
- Change the reading, research, and development work from traditional textbooks and journals to web sites.
- Partner with the Ohio Resource Center, committed to making their site attractive, useful, and relevant to Ohio’s new academic content standards.
- Center the coursework on developing a lesson that the teacher can try out in the classroom, provide plenty on online support, and listen to teacher feedback.
Ohio Resource Center Site
Principal’s Office took an e-trip to the site and gave the plan a try. Since Springfield is implementing the Literacy Framework, we clicked on Reading.
In its own words, the Reading site resources “support an integrated approach to language arts instruction, visual literacy, and the language processes of writing, speaking, and listening.”
From there we clicked on a recently reviewed site called “The Matthew Brady Bunch.”
No sitcom star this Matthew Brady, but a Civil War photographer whose work invites analysis of that was and comparison with modern events.
What’s in It for the Teacher?
Objectives, time frames, curriculum alignment, additional resources, to be sure. Best of all are “click-to” resources pages for seven activities and a final evaluation. They include
- Student Project Outline
- Photographic Analysis form, sample photographs
- Photographic analysis, disks
- Research Guide
- How to Write a News Article, Peer Editing Guide
- HTML Template, disks
- Self-Assessment & Peer Evaluation
- Final Evaluation
