Leader
ISTE-E Standard Text
Leader - Educators seek out opportunities for leadership to support student empowerment and success and to improve teaching and learning. Educators:
Shape, advance and accelerate a shared vision for empowered learning with technology by engaging with education stakeholders.
Shape, advance and accelerate a shared vision: A variety of efforts that influence change and decision-making, for example, participating on committees; leading by example; mentoring or collaborating with colleagues to improve practice using technology; advocating for tech use with parents/guardians, administrators, other educators; voicing thoughts on education technology policy to national, state, district, school or city leaders
Empowering learning with technology: Learning where students are self-aware about their own learning preferences and needs and have significant voice and choice in setting learning goals. Empowered students leverage technology to determine how they will learn, demonstrate competency in meeting their goals and reflect on their learning process and outcomes.
Advocate for equitable access to educational technology, digital content and learning opportunities to meet the diverse needs of all students.
Equitable access: When all students have access to technology needed for learning and to culturally relevant curriculum and sources regardless of race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender-identity, sexuality, ability, primary language or any other factor that might hinder or unfairly advantage one student over another.
Educational technology: Devices, apps, webs resources, internet access, technology support and other digital tools used to deepen learning.
Digital content: Digital content may include open educational resources (OERs); digital media and podcasts; digital curriculum, including culturally relevant curriculum; news and other websites; and digitized original or historical resources such as newspapers, virtual field trips or virtual reality (VR) software and devices.
Learning opportunities: Educators plan for learning that accommodates differing access levels and individual student needs, for example, providing homework alternatives for students who do not have internet access at home, providing competency-based or other opportunities to demonstrate learning, scaffolding student learning to challenge and support individual students where they are and advocating for an equitable system for all students.
Diverse needs: Diverse needs might include learner variability; language skills; technology and internet access levels outside of school; cultural specificity and challenges at home such as poverty, homelessness, or instability
Model for colleagues the identification, exploration, evaluation, curation and adoption of new digital resources and tools for learning.
Identification: Finding new tools or resources to enhance learning by asking or observing colleagues or students, reading related publications and following other educators or thought leaders.
Exploration: Experimenting with new tools and resources for learning and being open to calculated risk-taking an productive failure for continuous learning
Evaluation: Analyzing and reflecting on the value of a new tool or resource for learning and possible improvements for the next time it is used.
Curation: Thoughtfully organizing resources in a way that is useful and meaningful.
Adoption: Incorporating selected new resources and strategies into regular practice.
New digital resources and tools for learning: These may include OERs; apps, websites and other software; hardware tools and devices; networked devices and the "Internet of Things;" and emerging pedagogies around digital tools and resources.
Reflection
The COVID-19 pandemic has aided in identifying new leaders within our field and the roles that they will play for the future of education. Many stakeholders in education needed to make the difficult decision of whether they will adapt to its changing landscape and entering the virtual world, ignore the changes in the world and continue with outdated practices, or acknowledge that their time in this field is over and retire from it. The standard of leader requires us all to acknowledge our individual roles in accepting and promoting the use of technology in our classroom. This goes beyond the thought that it may be "nice" to have and utilize tech in the class. We must understand that it is NECESSARY for the classroom to advance and promote student learning. Being a leader moves beyond accepting technology, and goes toward advocating and promoting its use in student learning. Technology is a very broad term and has different connotations associated with it depending on who your audience is. I believe this standard does an extensive job in identifying specifically what this technology can consist of, how we can incorporate it into our lessons and eliminate excuses for its use and/or its absence, and how we can effect change in our colleagues/decision-makers in education. A leader does not need to be an expert in using technology in the classroom with different certifications and training showing how comfortable they are with a topic. Leaders in this field simply need to understand its growing importance in education and encourage it to evolve into what it was meant to be, empowering future generations.
Artifact 1
My first artifact is becoming the unofficial technology coordinator at my school assisting students, teachers, parents, and administrators during the COVID-19 pandemic. This role resulted in me developing and executing trackers and systems to address device distribution to both students and teachers, support for issues with this technology, and managing a team of volunteers in addressing the needs of our school community. My district was playing catch-up with the use of technology and at the beginning of the pandemic, none of our students had devices at home to use for virtual learning. Most schools didn't even have enough devices to give out to all of their families for use. I had to organize and see which families needed the devices the most, communicate to receive more devices to provide for families in need, and also distribute these devices. The first few months of the pandemic i found myself driving all over the city of Newark delivering chromebooks to students homes and assisting parents to connect to district-provided wifi anywhere in the city through partnerships with Optimum. I also even created a Google Voice number which i made sure to provide to all our families and be able to provide support and communicate in a way that was familiar to them. The ability to send and receive pictures and text messages allowed me to support families at home, right when the issue was occurring.
This role also involved showing and teaching our teachers how to set up their Smartboards, its potential uses in the classroom, and different ways they can make their teaching even easier. Many didn't know or were scared of using multiple screens, and simply wanted a mirrored image. Once I explained to the simplicity of extended displays and how it would allow them to multi-task and address both students at home and complete their own work, I could see how relieved they were. The concept proved so useful that some teachers eagerly went and purchased their own screens to have 3 and 4 extened displays in the classroom!
Artifact 2
My second artifact is the Attendance Tracker system that i developed on google sheets for seeing student attendance. As discussed in the previous use of this artifact, attendance policies were unclear and PowerSchool was not able to keep up with the evolving nature of attendance. I developed a system that allowed tracking teacher submission status, student attendance, and schoolwide data much simpler and appropriate for the state of emeregency. Students had the option of being Present, Asynchronous, Contact Only, or Absent. The reason this falls under the standard for leader is because the same tracker that was developed for my school overnight, was distributed to our entire network and encouraged to be used to track attendance across multiple schools. I received communications from Attendance Counselors and administrators in other buildings that wanted to use my system at their school as well. I provided them with the one i developed as a template and coached them on how to fill in with their own rosters. I received feedback and was able to make my system better, make the system work for the specific needs of that school, and also encourage the use of cloud-based technologies across networks. At the onset of virtual learning, a lot of data entry was done manually and copied and pasted across multiple documents. After my development of this tracker and showing the extent to which it could be used, many other sheets that referenced already existing data started appearing. Our use of technology became more efficient of our time and user-friendly. I eventually participated in a PD session where I demonstrated the use of this tracker as well as how to pull data from PowerSchool beyond the templates provided by the system.