At ASU Prep, we are committed to growing our teachers as leaders. Although we are a lean organization, we are greatly resourced with a talented, innovative, and caring staff of teachers who serve as leaders across many areas on our campuses. Our Investing in Innovation (i3) Grant has allowed us to fund a network-wide Technology Integration Specialist to help lead some of our priority initiatives for using technology to connect teachers, families, and students. Planning ahead for the future at ASU Prep after the grant, we committed to the sustainability of our projects---our students deserve it, and our teachers are ready! That is where our Teacher Technology Leaders (TTLs) come into the picture. They are our new model for Tech Integration Specialists located right in the heart of the schools. While ASU Prep will continue to provide network-wide educational technology support, it will do so in part by shifting edtech expertise to our school sites. The 2016-17 school year is the first year of the TTL program. Over the course of the first semester, there were two TTLs, one on each of two of our campuses is Phoenix and Mesa. They helped lead professional development (both in person and through our online PD platform), mentored new teachers on the tools we use for family communication, built new tools for improving use of benchmarks data for instruction, and gave great feedback on how we could continue to grow the TTL program. This semester we added two additional TTLs to specialize for elementary and secondary programs. We have ambitious plans for summer professional development offerings. We also are looking forward to beginning our own series of edtech mini-conferences that will begin as programs to support ASU Prep teachers, but that we can see being open to supporting teachers in our neighboring districts. The immediate impact of this shift from delivering our edtech centrally to the schools is increased teacher buy-in to explore, learn about, and use technology to deepen student learning. Our teachers self report feeling more supported to discover and learn innovative tools to support their practice and their students. Do you have questions about how to build teachers as technology leaders? Do you want to collaborate through virtual participation in our ed-tech mini-conference or learn more about online PD? Email [email protected] to keep the conversation going!
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AuthorJohn Sharp is the ASU Preparatory Academy Director of Curriculum and Professional Development Archives
May 2017
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