After the Christa Conference I came back to school a little more driven to collaborate with Niko (Tech Integrator). The session done by Sheil and Gilcreast did a great job in highlighting the benefits and challenges of developing the relationship and they offered a very viable starting point – Professional Development.
We really liked the flipped-model Sheil and Gilcreast used – develop a module around a topic, and staff that completed the module would get an hour of PD. This model would allow our staff to do their PD at a time and pace convenient to them. Additionally, if staff found the training offered was not relevant to their professional growth, they didn’t have to do the module.
We got support for the idea from our Principal, Director of IT and Assistant Superintendent, so the next step was to decide on the topics. Niko and I both had a ton of ideas and we got Josh (Diector of IT) involved in the conversation. Josh is really interested in supporting our staff’s use of the Microsoft 365 tools, in particular OneDrive. All of the staff in our district use Outlook email, so it was decided – a module on getting the most out of Outlook and OneDrive.
Josh handled the OneDrive content. Niko and I decided on some possible features of Outlook our staff should know about, and we went to curating or producing videos that would cover walk our staff through the feature. Microsoft has a nice page filled with well done video tutorials, and we used some of those, but we really wanted our staff to hear our voices – really cement the idea that we can teach and support their use of this tool. I did a screencast on setting up automatic replies:
Last week we rolled out our first Flipped Friday (here’s a link, but it will only work if you work in ORCSD). One thing I have noticed is that some staff, while working through the module, have reached out to me for support – to me this is maybe the biggest win – I have more impact when my colleagues see me a useful resource and trust me enough to ask for help. Also, the fact that this training was produced collaboratively is huge.
We have received positive, anecdotal feedback but I really hope people fill out the evaluation survey embedded at the end of the module. I am particularly interested in people’s thoughts on the delivery platform (in the spirit of Microsoft 365 we used Sway) and the type of topics they would like us to cover.
I am very excited about a future of supporting my colleagues with collaboratively produced learning modules.
Nick Bellows 