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Monongalia County Public Schools: Making Great Learning Happen with Technology |
| Date Added: May 16, 2011 06:41:04 PM |
| Author: pds20 |
| Category: Science And Technoglogy: Technology |
| How can district level administrators ensure that teachers effectively integrate technology to transform the teaching process while engaging their students in transformational learning experiences? As research over many years has shown, leadership is a key factor when it comes to making great learning happen with technology. Nancy Napolillo, the Technology Director for Monongalia County Public Schools in West Virginia, understands this well. Her outstanding leadership and commitment to successful technology integration for teachers and students in Monongalia County earned her this year’s prestigious Gaston Caperton Technology Award. Nancy is a lifelong educator whose passion for teaching and learning is readily apparent. “I’m just fortunate to be in a situation with our great teachers and wonderful support in Monongalia County,” Nancy said recently. “We are making significant progress in reaching our goals of improving student learning with technology. We are very fortunate that teachers in our county have embraced 21st century learning skills early on, and have moved forward significantly.” An early advocate for technology integration, Nancy went on to say, “The West Virginia CSOs (Content Standards and Objectives) drive our curricula and instruction and so we only choose technology tools that can be seamlessly integrated to help students achieve the learning objectives in our standards. The bottom line is that when used effectively, technology helps engage students in the process of constructing knowledge and developing their higher order thinking skills. This is an enjoyable process, and when kids enjoy learning you see a more productive classroom.” “We’ve been facilitating the change of instructional models from lecture, and reliance on textbooks, to a more constructivist philosophy of learning. TechSteps is helping us make this transition because the inquiry-based projects stimulate students’ higher order thinking and conceptual understanding in core content areas, while enabling students to engage in the process of constructing knowledge. TechSteps gives teachers exactly the right kinds of models to use with their students, while helping them think differently about how they deliver instruction with technology.” Helping teachers understand and develop 21st century learning skills themselves, is proving effective in helping Monongalia students gain fluency with those skills. Nancy explained, “It’s extremely important that we teach 21st century information and communication technology literacies. Many of our teachers have been teaching for 20 or more years, and yet they understand that they need to acquire, and then model these skills, in order to elicit them from their students. Just as our CSOs help teachers think differently about what they teach, the 21st century skills standards help them think differently about how they teach with technology. TechSteps is such a valuable tool that helps them with this transformation.” “In the past, we wanted teachers to create their own technology integration lessons from scratch, but this process proved to be too time-consuming. TechSteps gives our teachers a running start because they see, and can work through, a finished project and then understand the carry-over to the classroom. Teachers see the learning scaffolds in TechSteps, use them as a springboard for their own creativity, then use the strategies of the activity to understand sound instructional design. The bottom line is that, with TechSteps, teachers get ready-made high quality modules that engage students, and this has made it easy for them to be successful integrating technology into their standards-driven lessons.” Nancy Napolillo Technology Director Monongalia County Public Schools |
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