Advice for Beginning Tech Coordinators

I was asked recently by former colleagues to help out a new teacher who has taken on a tech coordinator position at a Chicago charter school. I sketched out a few basic ideas for her in an email, and I thought I'd post it here as well. I wanted to give her some starting points without completely overwhelming her. I'm not sure if this is a tech coaching position focused on tech integration or if she'll be teaching technology skills to students as a prep. Hopefully, it's the former!

What other resources would you suggest? 

1) Start networking with others.

• Join Illinois Computing Educators, the local affiliate of the International Society for Technology in Education. Their web site is located at http://iceberg.org. This group holds a great annual conference in February in St. Charles, and several small mini-conferences throughout the year that are really good. (If you're not in Illinois, find out about your local ISTE affiliate!)
• Join Classroom 2.0, a site devoted to helping teachers learn about new and emerging technologies. This is a great place to ask questions and get advice from others. They also host a weekly webinar on Saturday mornings on various topics.
• Consider using Twitter as a networking tool. Follow other educators and their conversations to get ideas. Here's a list of suggested people to follow, some education related, some not. http://twitter.com/#/list/elemenous/recommended

2)  Take a look at some important documents about ed tech and consider the implications for schools.

• National Educational Technology Plan  (make sure to check out the full version with examples)
• K12 Horizon Report

3) Find out what other schools are doing. 

• Technology Integration Matrix
• Edutopia - Technology Integration
• School Computing Wikia - Integration Examples

4) Other good general sites worth exploring resources are:

• Internet4Classrooms
• Teachers First
• WebQuest.org

 

Comments

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Good list. I've been teaching tech for ten years and I picked up a few hints. Another good forum is the Ning, Elementary Tech Teachers (http://elementarytechteachers.ning.com/). Not as busy as Classroom 2.0 but more personal.